Research questions: What questions need to be answered? What kind of answers does Endoscopy aim to publish?

Dear readers and friends of Endoscopy,

The aims of the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ESGE) include improving the quality of digestive endoscopy and promoting awareness, teaching, and research in gastrointestinal endoscopy and related fields. This is reflected in its current structure, with Committees dedicated to these goals. In recent years the ESGE Research Committee, chaired by Colin Rees (UK), has had a special interest in to defining the key unanswered questions within the field of gastrointestinal endoscopy [1], to foreground areas of high interest for researchers, scientific societies and, hopefully, funding organizations.

A 3-step Delphi process, that finally involved 291 responders from 60 countries, ultimately defined 26 research questions. These questions should clarify:

1. the exact role of advanced endoscopic imaging, and the best ways to teach and disseminate the continuing developments in this field;

2. the natural history of various commonly seen gastrointestinal diseases in order to determine the correct surveillance interval after a specific diagnosis;

3. the role of endoscopy as more than a mere tool or technique but as a true measure of disease;

4. the best markers of endoscopy quality and their relevance in relation to the abovementioned questions;

5. the continually evolving therapeutic role of endoscopy, particularly addressing its relative benefit compared to the standard of practice and to other equally noninvasive alternatives;

Endoscopy as the official organ of ESGE, is engaged in its role as a leading journal in this field, with well-defined priorities and a clear editorial focus on these endoscopic topics. As Editors we aim to publish large multicenter studies, ideally with an experimental design, and also studies that formally assess the teaching and dissemination of technologies. Ideally, investigators collaborate nationally and internationally, designing and performing randomized trials with adequate gold standards (immediate if they exist, or medium- to long-term clinically relevant outcomes, such as progression of disease or death) to assess the added value of endoscopic procedures (for example, post-polypectomy studies [2]). If randomization is not possible, large observational multicenter studies, representing all the steps of validation of clinical decision rules, from derivation to external validation, are required; these could also represent the basis for (re)considering the natural history of some disorders (e. g., gastric atrophy [3]) or for the assessment of key features of endoscopy quality [4]. Moreover, novel and sometimes provocative ideas/techniques in the field of training or therapy may also be of interest to report and we will continue to give these special attention.

On behalf of the Editorial team, we hope you will find these key unanswered research questions helpful in planning your (endoscopic and gastrointestinal) research.

Mário Dinis-Ribeiro and Peter D. Siersema

Co-Editor-in-Chief and Editor-in-Chief, Endoscopy

• References

• 1 Rees CJ, Ngu WS, Regula J et al. European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy – Establishing the key unanswered research questions within gastrointestinal endoscopy. Endoscopy 2016; 48: 884-891
• 2 Jover R, Bretthauer M, Dekker E et al. Rationale and design of the European Polyp Surveillance (EPoS) trials. Endoscopy 2016; 48: 571-578
• 3 Dinis-Ribeiro M, Kuipers EJ. Identification of gastric atrophic changes: from histopathology to endoscopy. Endoscopy 2015; 47: 533-537
• 4 Rutter MD, Senore C, Bisschops R et al. The European Society ofGastrointestinal Endoscopy Quality Improvement Initiative: developing performancemeasures. Endoscopy 2016; 48: 81-89