"Though patients are routinely told that common endoscopic procedures are safe, we found that post-endoscopic infections are more common than we thought, and that they vary widely from one ASC facility to another," says lead researcher Susan Hutfless of Johns Hopkins University.
Colonoscopy is one of six options suggested by the American Cancer Society for colon cancer screening. The traditional recommendation is that patients be regularly screened starting at 50, but the ACS recently reduced its recommended age to 45.
Upper-GI endoscopies, known as EGDs, can be used to diagnose a number of problems in the upper digestive tract, including heartburn, swallowing issues, and abdominal pain.
Each year in the United States, there are more than 15 million colonoscopies and 7 million EGDs. Both procedures are performed with an endoscope, a reusable optical instrument that gives doctors a view of a patient's gastrointestinal tract. Besides screening and diagnosis, they can be used for procedures such as removing polyps without invasive surgery.
Researchers examined data from six states—California, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, New York, and Vermont—to track infection-related emergency room visits and unplanned inpatient admissions within seven and 30 days after a colonoscopy or EGD.
Post-endoscopic infection rates were previously believed to be in the neighborhood of one in a million, Hutfless says. The new study found a rate of infection seven or fewer days after a procedure was slightly higher than one in 1,000 for screening colonoscopies and about 1.6 per 1,000 for non-screening colonoscopies. Rates for EGDs within that time were more than three per 1,000.
Patients who had been hospitalized before undergoing one of the procedures were at even greater risk of infection. Since many ASCs lack an electronic medical record system connected to hospital emergency departments, those ASCs are unlikely to learn of their patients' infections, Hutfless says.
"If they don't know their patients are developing these serious infections, they're not motivated to improve their infection control."