Gastrostomy tubes: Fundamentals, periprocedural considerations, and best practices.

Gastrostomy tube placement is a procedure that achieves enteral access for nutrition, decompression, and medication administration. Preprocedural evaluation and selection of patients is necessary to provide optimal benefit and reduce the risk of adverse events (AEs). Appropriate indications, contraindications, ethical considerations, and comorbidities of patients referred for gastrostomy placement should be weighed and balanced. Additionally, endoscopist should consider either a transoral or transabdominal approach is appropriate, and radiologic or surgical gastrostomy tube placement is needed. However, medical history, physical examination, and imaging prior to the procedure should be considered to tailor the appropriate approach and reduce the risk of AEs.

Assessing the yield and safety of endoscopy in acute graft-vs-host disease after hematopoietic stem cell transplant.

BACKGROUND: Acute gastrointestinal (GI) graft-vs-host disease (aGVHD) is the most complication of hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) in patients with hematologic malignancy. Limited data exists on endoscopic evaluation of GVHD in post-HSCT patients with differing GI symptoms. Further, the diagnostic value of gross endoscopic findings as well as the safety of endoscopy in this commonly thrombocytopenic and neutropenic patient population remains unclear. AIM: To understand the diagnostic value of symptoms and gross endoscopic findings as well as safety of endoscopy in aGVHD patients. METHODS: We analyzed 195 endoscopies performed at City of Hope in patients who underwent allogeneic HSCT less than 100 d prior for hematologic malignancy and were subsequently evaluated for aGVHD via endoscopy. The yield, sensitivity, and specificity of diagnosing aGVHD were calculated for upper and lower endoscopy, various GI tract locations, and presenting symptoms. RESULTS: Combined esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) and flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS) demonstrated a greater diagnostic yield for aGVHD (83.1%) compared to EGD (66.7%) or FS (77.2%) alone with any presenting symptom. The upper and lower GI tract demonstrated similar yields regardless of whether patients presented with diarrhea (95.7% vs 99.1%) or nausea/vomiting (97.5% vs 96.8%). Normal-appearing mucosa was generally as specific (91.3%) as abnormal mucosa (58.7%-97.8%) for the presence of aGVHD. Adverse events such as bleeding (1.0%), infection (1.0%), and perforation (0.5%) only occurred in a small proportion of patients, with no significant differences in those with underlying thrombocytopenia (P = 1.000) and neutropenia (P = 0.425). CONCLUSION: Combined EGD and FS with biopsies of normal and inflamed mucosa demonstrated the greatest diagnostic yield regardless of presenting symptom and appears to be safe in this population of patients.