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 today at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in San Diego, Calif., 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.
"Based on these results, it appears that high-definition colonoscopy detects more precancerous polyps," he says. The findings are being presented by Anna Buchner, M.D., who led the research during a fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Florida. She is now at the University of Pennsylvania.
This study was conducted between September 2006 and December 2007 when Mayo Clinic in Florida was switching its six colonoscopy procedure rooms from standard colonoscopy endoscopes to high-definition endoscopes.
An endoscope is the lighted tube inserted into the colon and rectum to look for, and remove, polyps. A high-definition endoscope uses both a high-definition video chip and HD monitors (like HD television) that increase the resolution of the image, Dr. Wallace says.