A disposable camera that's easy to swallow

Doctors can now examine the human colon and small intestine with a camera that patients swallow. Called a wireless capsule endoscope, this stunning novel pill contains a tiny video camera, four tiny light sources, a TV transmitter, and an eight-hour battery. It can cast images of the insides of the two intestines for several hours. upon a recent edition of National Public Radio's Day to Day, Sydney Spiesel, MD spoke in detail about the promising novel technology. Spiesel teaches at Yale Medical place of education and writes a medical round pillar for the online magazine Slate.

Wireless capsule endoscopes are not sole much less invasive, but have the appearance to work better at detecting certain diseases of the intestines than traditional periscope-like cameras. Roughly the same shape and size as a large vitamin capsule, the camera is activated as pretty soon as the patient swallows it. It then transmits images at a rate of about sum of two units per second. The patient wears a belt pack that records everything. As the camera drifts southern it continues to record images until the battery races out, which in most clan allows it to cover the replete length of the small intestine. Occasionally, patients with strictures in the intestines owed to certain illnesses have experienced the capsule getting stuck; Spiesel says it is easily retrieved or washed without in these instances.

In increasingly belonging to all procedures like colonoscopy, doctors, direct the eye for signs of disease that affect the inside of the intestine. single such sign is GI bleeding, which could indicate a cancerous polyp or tumor, or inflammation of the lining of the bowel. Polyp in and of themselves are not necessarily dangerous, on the contrary colon cancer is among the greatest in quantity treatable of cancers if caught early, hence the popularity of regular colonoscopy for the general population. The process is recommended to people beginning as early as age 30 depending upon family history and other factors.

The ease, comfort, reacquisition of dignity, and improved safety of the fresh wireless endoscope aside, "these swallowed capsules are single of the best ways of identifying bleeding sites," says Spiesel. He also points on the outside that the pill was superior in detecting Crohn's disease in patients in a novel study in Berlin.

Crohn's disease is a long-term swelling bowel disease of unknown cause that greatest in quantity often affects the lower part of the small intestine, colon or the pair The disease is marked by the agency of many attacks of diarrhea, sunder stomach pain, nausea, fever, chills, and los of appetite and material part weight. Endoscopy involving a camera upon a long tether inserted into the rectum and snaked end the bowel has for many years been the traditional experiment but there is evidence now that the capsule course is superior to both traditional endoscopy and x-ray for detecting the disease. In the Berlin investigation not only did the pill manner of detection spot the disease 35 percent more repeatedly than these other methods, on the other hand it detected it higher up in the small intestine than it has at any time been seen. This latter achievement could change medical opinion about in what way to best treat the disease.

While the last 20 years have seen major advancements in the preparation before, discomfort during, and recuperation after traditional colonoscopy, there is little doubt that patients will delight in the availability of the novel wireless capsule endoscope.

(Tiny Video Camera presents Inside View of Human material part National Public Radio, Day to Day, May 1 2006 int. Sydney Spiesel, MD www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5373685; Mosby Medical Encyclopedia, revised ed 1992, Plume, New York, NY 926 pp)

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