Two days to a week in digestive endoscopy: what has the SFED (French Society of Digestive Endoscopy) register taught us in the last ten years (2001-2011)?

SFED studies initiated in 1998 have been systematically reproduced from 2001 to 2012. Over and above the annual information it supplies, a description of the main results recorded over the years is also useful. Their results, and especially their recovery in order to establish national projections, have been criticised, making a detailed analysis necessary. Surveys of practices set up by the Regional Health Agencies (Agences r,gionales de sant,) and that rely on administrative data are advantageous in that they are easy to use but suffer insofar as the codes used to make the diagnosis are not necessarily related to the "pertinence of the procedure". The results of these SFED studies highlight the need to stay vigilant as to the messages communicated to professionals and to the public. Thus, the rate of upper and lower abdominal exploration has dropped over the years from 25% to 16% of patients included. The studies of the most frequent procedures enable one to follow, with a high level of precision, the "prevalence of endoscopic exploration" in France. This is because identical values were returned by SFED studies and Regional Health Agency data extrapolated to a national level.With a respective prevalence of endoscopic exploration of the upper gastrointestinal tract and colonoscopy of 16.6 and 20.0 for 1,000 people, these values were, according to the Regional Health Agencies, 16.2 and 19.8 for 1,000 respectively in 2010. The significant drop in the SFED study participation rate cannot currently be explained but it is appreciable, going from 27.1% to 12.2% of hepatogastroenterologists between 2008 and 2011. The SFED studies produced solid data for regular endoscopic procedures. Their validity will be all the more compelling for less frequent endoscopic procedures if the participation rate is higher. The upcoming studies must assemble data enabling one to better harness the motivations to participate in them in order to increase this rate.