A Prospective Study Comparing Urgent Video Capsule Endoscopy With Urgent Double-balloon Enteroscopy

Overt obscure gastrointestinal bleeding (OGIB) is a distinct clinical entity with significantly worse outcomes compared with colonic bleeding and upper GI bleeding. The mortality rate for patients with acute small bowel bleeding was 10%.1 Recently, a meta-analysis of 10 studies showed that VCE and DBE have an equivalent diagnosis yields in patients with obscure GIB (62% for VCE and 56% for DBE).2 The limitation of this meta-analysis study was that the included studies examined patients with occult OGIB and overt OGIB. Comparing with occult OGIB, patients with overt OGIB are more likely to present a significant lesion that causes a recurrent bleeding which subsequently increases risk of morbidity and mortality.3 According to emergency endoscopy concept from upper and lower GIB, patients with overt OGIB have been demonstrated the usefulness of urgent VCE and urgent DBE in a diagnosis tool with an impact on clinical management.4-7 Although previous studies showed promising data about the use of urgent enteroscopy, the debate about using VCE or DBE first in patients with massive overt OGIB is still uncertain. Thus in this study, we conducted the prospective study to compare urgent VCE with urgent DBE in patients with massive overt OGIB.