Functional gastrointestinal diseases: mechanisms of development and principles of multitarget therapy

Abstract

Currently, functional dyspepsia (FD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are among the most common nosological  units in the structure of functional gastrointestinal  diseases in adults. An important problem of treatment of these diseases at the current stage of medicine is low efficiency of monotarget drugs, which is determined by multicomponent pathogenesis. Indeed, the currently available  methods of drug treatment of FD and IBS have suboptimal  efficacy, as illustrated  by recent meta-analyses demonstrating high rates of NNT (the average number of patients who need to be treated to achieve a certain favorable outcome). In addition, the frequent “overlap” of these diseases forces clinicians to prescribe several drugs with different pharmacological actions to the patient, which inevitably leads to a decrease in compliance. The optimal strategy for managing patients with FD and IBS is the tactics of multitarget drugs that act on several links in the pathogenesis of these pathologies and have a significant evidence base in the effectiveness and safety of use. STW 5 (Iberogast®), included  in the clinical  guidelines  of the Russian Gastroenterological Association on the diagnosis and treatment of patients with FD, published in 2017, has the above-mentioned characteristics, as well as the clinical guidelines of the Russian Gastroenterological Association in collaboration with the Russian Association of Coloproctologists on the diagnosis and treatment of IBS, published in 2021. The clinical effectiveness of Iberogast in the treatment of FD and IBS has been demonstrated in a number of randomized trials, the results of which showed high efficacy of the drug and its good tolerability.