String sign (bowel)

Last revised by Mohammad Taghi Niknejad on 11 Jan 2024

The gastrointestinal string sign (also known as the string sign of Kantor) refers to the string-like appearance of a contrast-filled bowel loop caused by its severe narrowing.

Originally used to describe the reversible narrowing caused by spasms in Crohn disease, it is now used for any severe narrowing of the bowel lumen, including that seen in hypertrophic pyloric stenosis, gastrointestinal tuberculosis, carcinoid tumor, and colon cancer.

History and etymology

It was first described in a short case series of six patients with terminal ileitis by John L Kantor, an American gastroenterologist from New York, in 1934 4. This was only two years after Crohn's seminal paper on his eponymous inflammatory bowel disease.

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