Schmidt M, Ankerst DP, Chen Y, et al. - Given patients with symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) are mostly provided with endoscopic screening for Barrett's esophagus, and the development of Barrett's esophagus and esophageal adenocarcinoma might be influenced by other epidemiologic risk factors, so, attempts to enhance the efficiency of screening to detect the Barrett's esophagus population “at risk” vs the normal population are required, therefore, researchers undertook a cross-sectional study, wherein, they performed a comparison between patients (n = 587) with Barrett's esophagus from the multicenter German BarrettNET registry vs healthy people (n = 1,976) from the population-based German KORA cohort, with and without GERD symptoms. They analyzed data regarding demographic and lifestyle factors and found significant links of certain factors with Barrett's esophagus; these factors were increased age, male gender, smoking, heavy alcohol intake, low physical activity, low health status, and GERD symptoms. No change in these links was evident in patients stratified for GERD symptoms. Overall, demographic, lifestyle, and clinical factors as well as GERD symptoms were found to be related to Barrett's esophagus development in Germany, this indicates the possible usefulness of a collection of risk factors in developing individualized screening attempts for patients with Barrett's esophagus and GERD in Germany.