Opinion Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2024. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jan 21, 2024; 30(3): 204-210
Published online Jan 21, 2024. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v30.i3.204
Garg incontinence scores: New scoring system on the horizon to evaluate fecal incontinence. Will it make a difference?
Petr Tsarkov, Inna Tulina, Parvez Sheikh, Darya D Shlyk, Pankaj Garg
Petr Tsarkov, Darya D Shlyk, Department of Colorectal Surgery, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow 119991, Russia
Inna Tulina, Department of Oncologic Colorectal Surgery, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow 119991, Russia
Parvez Sheikh, Department of Colorectal Surgery, Saifee Hospital, Mumbai 400004, Maharashtra, India
Pankaj Garg, Department of Colorectal Surgery, Garg Fistula Research Institute, Panchkula 134113, Haryana, India
Author contributions: Tsarkov PV conceived and designed the study, collected and analyzed the data, revised the data, and finally approved and submitted the manuscript; Tulina I collected and analyzed the data, revised the data, finally approved and submitted the manuscript; Shaikh P critically analyzed the data, reviewed and edited the manuscript, finally approved and submitted the manuscript; Shlyk DD analyzed the data, revised the data, finally approved and submitted the manuscript; Garg P analyzed the data, revised the data, and finally approved and submitted the manuscript (Guarantor of the study).
Conflict-of-interest statement: No conflict of interest for any of the authors.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Pankaj Garg, MS, CEO, Surgeon, Department of Colorectal Surgery, Garg Fistula Research Institute, 1042, Sector-15, Panchkula 134113, Haryana, India. drgargpankaj@gmail.com
Received: October 7, 2023
Peer-review started: October 7, 2023
First decision: December 4, 2023
Revised: December 6, 2023
Accepted: December 22, 2023
Article in press: December 22, 2023
Published online: January 21, 2024
Processing time: 103 Days and 5.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Several scoring systems were used to assess fecal incontinence (FI), among which the most commonly used were Wexner’s, Vaizey’s, and FI Severity Index scoring systems. However, there are major lacunae and shortcomings in these scoring systems. A new scoring system, Garg incontinence scores (GIS), attempted to sort out the lacunae in the existing scoring systems. In the commentary, we analyzed the GIS while comparing it to the existing scoring systems. GIS seemed to be a major improvement over the existing scoring systems as almost all shortcomings of previous scoring systems have been addressed. However, this needs to be validated in further studies.