A review of factors predicting outcome of pneumatic dilation in patients with achalasia cardia.

Pneumatic dilation (PD) is an effective treatment for achalasia cardia. Outcome of PD, however, varies among different studies. Recently, some groups started considering laparoscopic myotomy to be competitive to PD in treatment of achalasia considering dreaded complication like perforation following the latter therapeutic approach. Therefore, there is need to predict outcome of PD for achalasia, so that appropriate therapy, both for treatment naïve and for treatment failed patients can be chosen. Apart from age and gender, 2 investigations, namely post-PD manometry and timed barium esophagogram are most often used to predict outcome after PD. Even though there are studies available in the literature with regard to these modalities to predict outcome of PD, these are quite few in number, including small number of patients, primarily because of rarity of the disease. In this article, we review the literature predicting outcome of PD for achalasia.