11 Studies to Know From ACG 2021

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. I'm Dr David Johnson, professor of medicine and chief of gastroenterology at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.

I've just returned from the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), which was recently reported to be the largest gastroenterology association in the world. This year's meeting was held in Las Vegas, live and in person, although there was a hybrid combination of virtual and onsite presence. It was so good to reconnect with colleagues and not have it be on a Zoom call.

ACG 2021 featured around 3500 abstracts, plenaries, and poster presentations. I've reviewed nearly all of them in order to give you my perspectives on the findings I believe to have the greatest practice-changing implications going forward.

Using Adenomas per Colonoscopy for Detecting Colorectal Cancer

Dr Joseph Anderson and colleagues from New Hampshire compared mean adenomas per colonoscopy vs the adenoma detection rate (ADR) as a quality measure for interval cancer protection.^[1] They evaluated 9023 colonoscopies from 138 endoscopists to assess for interval colorectal cancer diagnosed within 3 years.

They found that adenoma per colonoscopy may be as discriminant for interval cancer protection as ADR. An adenoma per colonoscopy cutoff of 0.4 per screening colonoscopy was on par with an ADR of 25%, which is conventionally recognized as the minimum threshold for a mixed-gender population. Increasing the adenoma per colonoscopy cutoff to 0.6 further improved outcomes by about a third.