The prevalence of adverse events associated with double-balloon enteroscopy from a single-centre dataset in Japan

There are few comprehensive reports detailing the prevalence of major adverse events associated with a double-balloon enteroscopy procedure.

We retrospectively investigated the prevalence of major adverse events in 538 patients (262 males and 276 females; median age, 65 years; age range, 12-95 years) who underwent double-balloon enteroscopy at our Institution between April 2008 and October 2011.

Of the 17 adverse events recorded (3.2%), acute pancreatitis (n=5; 0.9%) occurred during both diagnostic (n=3) and therapeutic (n=2) anterograde double-balloon enteroscopy, and all of them were treated conservatively. For these cases, the average duration of the examination was 135 min, which was longer than for the other patients (97 min) (P=0.046). Intestinal bleeding (1.3%) was observed in 6 cases after endoscopic polypectomy and in 1 case following a biopsy procedure during a diagnostic double-balloon enteroscopy. The prevalence rates of intestinal perforation and other complications were 0.2% and 0.7%, respectively.

The rate of adverse events associated with double-balloon enteroscopy was high compared to that associated with conventional upper/lower gastrointestinal endoscopy (0.042%/0.078%). The occurrence of acute pancreatitis may be significantly dependent on the duration of double-balloon enteroscopy examination.