Advantages and Disadvantages
Double-balloon enteroscopy offers a number of advantages to other small bowel image techniques, including barium imaging, wireless capsule endoscopy and push enteroscopy:
- it allows for visualization of the entire small bowel to the terminal ileum
- it allows for the application of therapeutics
- it allows for the sampling or biopsying of small bowel mucosa, for the resection of polyps of the small bowel, and in the placement of stents or dilatation of strictures of the small bowel.
- it allows for access to the papilla in patients with long afferent limbs after Billroth II antrectomy.
The key disadvantage of double-balloon enteroscopy is the time required to visualize the small bowel; this can exceed three hours, and may require that patients be admitted to hospital for the procedure. There have also been case reports of acute pancreatitis and intestinal necrosis associated with the technique.
Read more about this topic: Double-balloon Enteroscopy
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)