Study reports Double Balloon Endoscopy useful for diagnosis and treatment of obscure G...( OAK BROOK Ill. October 31 2008 A ...),Health

OAK BROOK, Ill. October 31, 2008 A study by researchers in Japan concludes that Double Balloon Endoscopy™ (DBE) was very useful in the diagnosis of obscure gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding and had a therapeutic impact on the majority of patients. The study appears in the October issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE).

Endoscopy is a procedure that uses an endoscope - a thin, flexible tube with a light and a lens on the end to look into the esophagus, stomach, duodenum, small intestine, colon, or rectum, in order to diagnose or treat a condition. There are many types of endoscopy, including colonoscopy, sigmoidoscopy, gastroscopy, enteroscopy, and esophogogastroduodenoscopy (EGD). Capsule endoscopy (CE) uses a pill- sized video capsule, which has its own lens and light source that the patient swallows for examination of the small intestine. The balloon assisted enteroscopy technique is a new method that advances the scope through the small intestine by inflating and deflating balloons, and pleats the small bowel over a tube like a curtain rod. This technique allows for diagnosis and treatment of small intestinal disorders. Balloon assisted enteroscopy can be performed with one or two balloons. When two balloons are used, the technique is referred to as Double Balloon Endoscopy™.

"The source of GI bleeding can be identified in most cases by conventional upper-GI and lower-GI endoscopy, but approximately five percent of all GI bleeding remains undiagnosed," said study lead author Shu Tanaka, MD, Nippon Medical School, Tokyo, Japan. "Until now, there has been no in-depth analysis about the diagnostic yield of DBE in patients with obscure GI bleeding. Our study showed that the sensitivity of DBE was 92.7 percent in the diagnosis of small intestinal lesions in patients with obscure GI bleeding and overall diagnostic
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