11.   Most individuals experience the urge to defecate on morning awakening and after meals, when colonic motility is known to peak.

12.   Apart from increasing our understanding of normal colonic motility patterns, prolonged recordings are providing useful information about different pathological conditions.

13.   Although irritable bowel syndrome is commonly believed to be a colonic motility disorder, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is inconsistent.

14.   Prolonged pancolonic recordings may play an important role in elucidating the physiological mechanisms underlying different patterns of colonic motility and their functional significance.

15.   Moreover, the application of the barostat to long term recordings of colonic motility, may prove useful to assess other pathopysiological aspects of functional colonic disorders.

16.   Colonic motility can be conveniently considered under two related aspects, intraluminal pressure activity and transit of intraluminal contents.

17.   Measurements of colonic pressurss are confounded by pronounced intra and interindividual variation of colonic motility indices depending on factors that are obscure and thus difficult to control.

18.   As well as arousal from sleep and the complex effects of food and polypeptide hormones, neurotransmitters have been shown to affect colonic motility.

19.   There has recently been a revival of interest in changes in colonic motility in ulcerative colitis.

20.   Some patterns of normal colonic motility have begun to emerge, but specific abnormalities are yet to be defined.