Esophagogastroduodenoscopy in Patients Aged 75 Years and Older: A Single-Center Study

Esophagogastroduodenoscopy is frequently used for the elderly population. Older patients are more fragile than younger patients because of multiple age-related chronic diseases and the common use of polypharmacy. There is no adequate data in the existing literature regarding the application of upper gastrointestinal system endoscopy in the elderly population. Therefore, in this article, we evaluated esophagogastroduodenoscopy procedures that were performed on patients aged 75 years or older in the secondary care hospital.

We performed a retrospective observational study of patients aged 75 years or older who underwent esophagogastroduodenoscopy between January 2016 and January 2021 at the Istanbul Sultanbeyli State Hospital Endoscopy Unit. Indications of endoscopy, ages, genders, endoscopic diagnoses, polyp/tumor/biopsy localizations, histopathological examination of biopsies, and complications of esophagogastroduodenoscopy were analyzed.

A total of 202 patients were analyzed. The most common indication was dyspepsia (25%), followed by gastrointestinal bleeding, reflux, anemia, and screening/surveillance. For patients aged 75-79 years and patients aged ≥80 years, endoscopic diagnoses of esophageal and gastric malignancies were observed as 6.4% and 18%, respectively. Very relevant findings of endoscopy (esophageal and gastric malignancies; gastric and duodenal ulcers) were detected in 39 (19.3%) of all included patients. No complications due to endoscopic procedures were observed, but complications due to sedation (hypotension and hypoxemia) were observed in 5.0%.

After pre-procedural evaluation, we must be careful while doing endoscopic procedures in the elderly because of multiple age-related chronic diseases and the common use of polypharmacy. This present study showed that esophagogastroduodenoscopy is a safe procedure with a high diagnostic yield in patients aged 75 years and older.