Angiodysplasia of the colon: diagnosis and treatment

Gastrointestinal hemorrhage of obscure origin remains a difficult clinical problem, but newer methods of study, particularly endoscopy and angiography, have made inroads into this morass of diagnostic dilemmas. Vascular malformations represent entities that are relatively infrequent of occurrence and also difficult of detection. These characteristics render them particularly refractory to recognition. Once diagnosed, however, they are quite readily treated surgically, without resort to "blind" resections or multiple bowel entries. This report deals with three instances of obscure but important persistent blood loss into the gastrointestinal tract. In each instance, identification by customary diagnostic methods was unsuccessful, but was finally made through endoscopy and promptly cured through surgery. The bleeding in all 3 cases proved pathologically to have been caused by vascular malformations, which we have subsumed under the term "angiodysplasia."