It has been 40 years since the first issue of Digestive Diseases, the journal having the title Survey of Digestive Diseases (Volumes 1–3) was published in 1983. The anniversary is an occasion to gratefully pay tribute to those who started the journal and a great opportunity to look at four decades of medical progress in gastroenterology.
Since its inception, the journal has maintained its original aim to be a platform for clinical science and education in gastroenterology. In the first years, the journal was run by the founding Editors in Chief Prof. Thomas S. Chen and Prof. Rowen K. Zetterman, who guided the journal with a rigorous scientific approach. They assembled a capable board of international editors who worked to ensure that the journal would reach its goal of excellence. After Prof. Zetterman and Prof. Chen stepped down from their role, Prof. Richard P. McDermott and, later, Prof. Sami R. Achem took over the position of Editor in Chief, keeping the journal in the successful traditional format maintaining the focus on continuous medical education in the clinical management of digestive diseases.
With the increasing global dissemination of Digestive Diseases, in 2001, Dr. Thomas Karger thought of alternating the editorial responsibility and switching the editorial lead for some time to Europe. He offered me the responsibility as Editor in Chief. I accepted this invitation with enthusiasm and involved a growing number of outstanding colleagues, associates, and handling editors from around the globe to keep up with the continuous and rapidly growing developments in the diverse areas of gastroenterology and hepatology. Today, our editorial team continues in the spirit of the journal to reach out for and select high-value contributions with the aim to provide updates in clinical management and new original scientific research of clinical relevance to the community.
We celebrate the 40 years of history of Digestive Diseases with a special collection of articles tackling diseases of our medical discipline that underwent profound changes in clinical management. Looking at the issues of the journal in a time window of four decades, we can see the fundamental changes in our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying gastrointestinal and hepatic diseases, which eventually gave rise to the development of new therapies.
In some of the first issues of the journal, we read about previously unrecognized nosological entities just appearing on the clinical scene among them antibiotic-associated and Clostridioides difficile-related colitis, collagenous colitis, and eosinophilic esophagitis that still occupy us today in the search for optimized therapy solutions. We find topics in the early issues which lost attractiveness, e.g., endoscopic laser therapy for benign and malignant diseases in the upper gastrointestinal tract, and others that, despite unimaginable developments in immunotherapies, are still in search of better solutions, e.g., inflammatory bowel disease. In 40 years, Digestive Diseases witnessed groundbreaking new discoveries reflected in revolutionary changes of therapies. The discovery of Campylobacter pyloridis, later referred to as Helicobacter pylori, switched the conventional therapy of peptic ulcer disease characterized by regular relapses to the domain of anti-infective agents for the permanent cure of this chronic disease.
The discovery of the hepatitis C virus has overtaken the concept of non-A, non-B hepatitis to switch from minimally valuable immunosuppressive treatment with corticosteroids to selective antiviral medications for the cure of chronic hepatitis C. Such examples underline the mission of scientific and educational journals to value insights from the past and keep up with the continuous advances. Digestive Diseases has played and continues to play its important part in this context, serving the scientific community.
For this commemorative article collection, we have succeeded in attracting key contributing authors who have acquired long-term expertise in their field. They cover a selected number of widespread gastrointestinal and hepatic diseases from their discovery to the point of our knowledge with the most effective treatments available today. We are deeply grateful for these authors’ efforts!
Looking to the future of the journal, the challenges ahead are many, but so are the opportunities. Challenges include the acquisition of articles with high scientific clinical content in a very competitive field, encouraging the submission of high-level educational contributions, e.g., state-of-the-art reviews, and colleagues willing to support the journal by reviewing submitted articles.
Digestive Diseases remains an open opportunity, providing a broad platform that embraces expanding and novel topics from molecular and genetics-based personalized medicine to profoundly changing aspects with the introduction of artificial intelligence. New sections are addressing the breakthroughs in gut microbiota-related aspects in health and disease and advances in endoscopic technologies.
We would like to conclude this editorial by expressing our gratitude to all who have contributed to the success of Digestive Diseases over the past 40 years. Our special thanks go to the authors who have shared their valuable research results and findings with the community. We would also like to thank the reviewers, whose rigorous and fair assessments have contributed significantly to quality assurance. Finally, our thanks go to the readers, whose interest and commitment is the noblest reward for our efforts. On the occasion of the 40 years of Digestive Diseases, on behalf of our team of editors in the journal, we express our deep gratitude to the publishing team at Karger for the ongoing support and unrestricted assistance.
Statement of Ethics
In writing the article publications, ethics and editorial policies were strictly respected.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Funding Sources
The author declares no funding was obtained or used for this article.
Author Contributions
P.M. wrote the article.
