Bengaluru hospital performs capsule endoscopy on 12-year-old boy

BENGALURU : On Wednesday morning, doctors at Rainbow Children’s Hospital performed a capsule endoscopy on a child with gastrointestinal problems. A 12-year-old boy came in with complaints of constipation and abdominal pain, which he had been suffering from for the last three years now. Medicines were not working and the doctor’s suspected Crohn’s disease (an inflammatory bowel disease). In order to confirm this, a capsule was placed inside the body with the help of an endoscopy tube. 

“There is a camera inside the capsule that takes pictures every fraction of a second. We will monitor this for the next 24 hours. Through Bluetooth technology, images will be relayed onto a digital TV,” said Neeraj Lal, vice-president and cluster head of Bengaluru and Karnataka region, Rainbow Children’s Hospital.

The hospital claims that this is the first time a capsule endoscopy on a child in Bengaluru. “The camera gives a 360-degree view of the alimentary canal including the stomach, small and large intestine. The capsule will pass out of the body through regular bowel movements. It was difficult for us to procure a small-sized capsule that is suitable for the body size of a child. Thousands of pictures will be taken and produced on screen,” Lad said, adding that the images will be monitored on Thursday and the patient will be evaluated for Crohn’s disease.

The procedure was performed by Dr. Arun Garg, paediatric gastroenterologist. He said, “The procedure took 1 hour and 15 minutes but preparation prior to it and work after will take long. The child was kept on an empty stomach for 12 hours. After the capsule has been in the body for 24 hours, we will receive around 1,30,000 images.”