October 25, 2010
Screening: Side Effects From Endoscopic Procedures
By RONI CARYN RABIN

Patients rarely suffer serious side effects from endoscopic procedures like colonoscopies, but a new study reports that 1 in 100 experience complications serious enough to send them to the emergency room — a much higher rate than expected.

Instead of relying on doctors’ reports about adverse events, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston used electronic medical records to track emergency visits and hospital admissions that occurred within two weeks of a colonoscopy or upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy and that appeared to be related to the procedures.

The study included 6,383 outpatient upper endoscopies and 11,632 outpatient colonoscopies, resulting in 134 trips to the emergency room and 76 hospitalizations — all told, about 1 percent of all the procedures. (Physicians had reported only 31 complications.)

The study, published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine, did not capture patients who sought help at different hospitals.

The most common complication was abdominal pain, which accounted for nearly half of the adverse events.

“A lot of low-level complications were flying under the radar,” said Dr. Daniel Leffler, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard. “A lot of physicians wouldn’t consider abdominal pain a complication, but at the same time, the person went to the E.R. and missed work, so it was a significant burden to the patient and to the health care system.”