High-Definition Colonoscopy Detects More Polyps

Medical News Today
29th October 2009




High-definition (HD) colonoscopy is much more sensitive than standard colonoscopy in finding polyps that could morph into cancer, say researchers at the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida.

They say their findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in San Diego, are not only important because a large group (2,430) of patients participated, but they resulted from the only study to date that has compared these two methods in a general clinical practice setting, among all the patients who needed a colonoscopy and with all the physicians who performed it.

"There hasn't been a definitive trial to see whether high-definition colonoscopy detects more polyps or not, and this was a natural experiment, designed to ask if use of one endoscope or another makes a difference in day-to-day clinical practice," says the study's senior investigator, gastroenterologist Michael Wallace, M.D., a professor of medicine at the College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic.