MONDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- Around 13 percent of colonoscopies conducted in a large Canadian community were incomplete, with failed procedures more likely to occur in women and in those conducted in the office setting, according to a report in the June issue of Gastroenterology.
Linda Rabeneck, M.D., of the Toronto Sunnybrook Regional Cancer Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues conducted a population-based study of men and women aged 50 to 74 who underwent a colonoscopy between 1999 and 2003, to determine the completion rate and to identify factors contributing to incomplete procedures.
The investigators found that 43,483 of 331,608 (or 13.1 percent) of colonoscopies were incomplete, with incomplete procedures occurring more often in older patients, females and in those with a prior history of abdominal or pelvic surgery. In addition, the likelihood of an incomplete colonoscopy was more than threefold greater when performed in a private office than in an academic hospital.
"The observed trends in higher completion rates over time should continue to be monitored, and the underlying reasons for the observed differences investigated with data that have more clinical detail," writes Gregory Cooper, M.D., of University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in an editorial. "If colonoscopy practice cannot achieve the pre-specified benchmarks, there will be additional impetus for a shift to other emerging screening technologies."
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