Derived from Greek roots meaning “difficult digestion,” dyspepsia has long served as a synonym for indigestion, one of the most common – and etiologically varied – of human miseries. It has thus been as regularly employed to label the symptoms of diverse organic disorders as to identify a distinct disease, with the result that some gastroenterologists find the word uselessly elastic: “This is really a meaningless term because it has so many meanings.” The majority of practitioners, however, have reached a consensus to use dyspepsia to denote either the ailment of functional indigestion or the symptoms of peptic ulcer.

Distribution and Incidence

Peptic ulcer dyspepsia is rare in people under the age of 20, but by age 30, 2 percent of the males and 0.5 percent of the females in a population have developed the condition. For men, the incidence increases steadily with age, reaching a peak of around 20 percent in the sixth decade of life. The incidence for women remains low, about 1 percent, until menopause, after which it climbs as rapidly as in men. A morbidity rate of nearly 14 percent has been reported in women in the age group 70 to 79. Death from peptic ulcer occurs three times as often in men as women.

The prevalence of functional dyspepsia, by contrast, is uncertain. Having no distinct pathology, being neither communicable nor reportable, and only occasionally motivating its victims to seek medical help, it does not generate statistics. The widely shared clinical impression is that women are affected more than men, and people under the age of 40 more than those over age 40.