Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Clinical evidence is slowly accumulating about the effectiveness of virtual colonoscopy as a screening tool for colon disease. But the procedure is also proving adept at finding incidental lesions outside the colon, even if a low-dose protocol is used.
That's the word from an article we're featuring this week in our Virtual Colonoscopy Digital Community, by staff writer Eric Barnes. The story notes a key advantage of virtual colonoscopy over competing colon screening techniques such as optical colonoscopy and barium enema, which cannot detect incidental lesions outside the colon.
In the study, New York City researchers examined 250 patients with both optical and virtual colonoscopy. VC revealed extracolonic findings in a third of the patients, with nearly 13% of the findings deemed "highly significant," such as lung or liver lesions.
But what about the cost of following up all those suspicious findings? As in previous studies, the authors found their follow-up costs to be quite low. Get the bottom line on costs -- and the imaging protocols the researchers used -- in our Virtual Colonoscopy Digital Community, at vc.auntminnie.com.
