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Capsule Endoscopy: Easy. Painless. Convenient!
Easy-to-swallow capsule. Non-invasive. No radiation. No scope, no sedation. FDA approved. Approximately 55,000 digital images. The 8-hour exam takes place while you go about your daily activities. Covered by Medicare and many major health insurance companies.

New Endoscopy Capsule allows doctors to see small intestine in a new light.

What if you were a plumber and couldn't find the leak?

That’s how doctors often feel when they are trying to treat a patient who has unexplained signs of blood loss in the digestive tract. It’s like a water leak behind your shower wall – it’s got to be there, but where?

"Until now, the interior of your small intestine was shrouded in mystery," says Marc K. Taormina, MD. "We could view the first four feet of your digestive tract with an upper endoscopy, or see the final six feet with a colonoscopy, but there were no tools that could let us look inside the 20 feet of twists and turns of your small intestine. Today, all that has changed," he said.

Now, when other diagnostic procedures fail to determine the reason for your symptoms, you can swallow a tiny video camera inside a capsule. As the M2A camera travels naturally through your digestive system, it can capture more than 57,000 crystal clear images in eight hours, showing your doctor nearly every nook and cranny in your small intestine.

Guts: The Movie
Sounds like something from a sci-fi thriller, doesn’t it? This tiny camera-in-a-capsule weighs only one seventh of an ounce and is about the size of a large vitamin. It contains a color video camera, a wireless transmitter, 4 lights, and a battery. The technology was approved by the Food & Drug Administration in July 2003 and is already being used in over 1,300 sites worldwide. Many major health insurance companies and Medicare are already paying for the procedure.

"The process, itself, is simple and painless. It’s non-invasive. There’s no radiation involved," Dr. Taormina said. "It’s revolutionary."

How does it work? You fast for 10-12 hours the night before the test. In the morning, your doctor applies sensors to your abdomen and you swallow the capsule. For the next eight hours you wear a belt containing data receivers, and you go about your daily activities while the receivers record data and images and track the progress of the camera through your intestinal tract.

Two hours after you begin you’ll be able to drink liquids, and four hours after swallowing the capsule you can have a light meal. At the end of eight hours, you return the data recorder and sensors, and we download all of your data into our computers. The disposable capsule will pass naturally through your system and be eliminated.

Why capsule endoscopy?
In addition to finding the source of intestinal bleeding, capsule endoscopy can help diagnose other disorders of the small intestine, including:

  - intestinal cancer,
  - Crohn’s disease,
  - iron deficiency anemia,
  - malabsorptive diseases such as celiac/sprue,
  - irritable bowel syndrome and intestinal injury, and
  - unexplained abdominal pain and diarrhea.


Image of normal vilii	Image of Crohn's Disease	Image of jejunum with active bleeding

Once we've identified the problem, we can start treating it correctly. This may mean something as simple as dietary changes or drug therapies, or it may mean endoscopic treatments or surgery. If these more complex procedures are necessary, they’ll be simpler now, too, since the M2A capsule has shown us the approximate location of the problem.

Dr. Taormina calls capsule endoscopy an exciting technology that offers great advances in patient care. But he stresses that it is not a replacement for standardized upper endoscopy (used to diagnose diseases of the esophagus and stomach) or colonoscopy (to examine the colon and rectum).

If you’d like to learn more, or if you think that you might be a good candidate for this procedure, call us for an appointment: 816-836-2200.

More detailed information is available on Capsule Endoscopy