“…These risk factors for older Japanese women were similar to the risk factors demonstrated in previous studies focusing on Japanese patients with reflux esophagitis [8,9,20]. Most previous studies evaluated the effects of PPI on reflux esophagitis by endoscopic examination, pH monitoring and questionnaires [8,9,20,21,22,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. However, the present study indicates that evaluation of the therapeutic effects of PPI by the physicians who take care of reflux patients in daily clinical situations may be convenient and useful compared with evaluation by endoscopy and/or questionnaires.…”