Latest Clinical & Research News
Specialty: Gastroenterology & GI Surgery
In 2017, nearly 700,000 robotic-assisted procedures were performed in the United States. Robotic surgery is fast becoming the preferred method for procedures in gynecological, thoracic, urologic, colon and rectal surgery. Today, a wide range of colorectal problems can be treated with robotic surgery.
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Absent of a cure for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), physicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have pioneered a broader approach to improving the health of patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s by focusing on lifestyle, health education and psychosocial aspects of disease.
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Over the past two decades, the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) has become a national leader in the care of patients with hereditary gastrointestinal cancers, from Lynch syndrome to polyposis syndromes.
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For 26 years, the Center for Pancreatic Disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been at the forefront of providing care for patients with pancreatic diseases. The Center’s three medical pancreatologists, who include Peter A. Banks, MD, Julia Y. McNabb-Baltar, MD, MPH, and David X. Jin, MD, MPH, work collaboratively with interventional radiologists, gastrointestinal surgeons and therapeutic endoscopists to provide the latest diagnostic and treatment options for acute and chronic pancreatitis, pancreatic cysts, hormone-producing tumors and cancer.
A treatment option that has shown to improve clinical outcomes and prognosis in patients with peritoneal metastasis is cytoreductive surgery with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC). While HIPEC can improve disease-free survival in many patients, it’s a major operation.
Over the last decade, bariatric surgeons have made strides in performing weight-loss surgery that not only reverses obesity but can also reverse type 2 diabetes in patients with both conditions.
Medication non-adherence remains a major challenge across nearly all diseases. To address complex medication regimens and combination therapies, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have developed a “mini pill box” that can stay in the stomach for one week and provide a long-lasting dose of multiple medications.
In a study published online in Nature Communications in January, researchers from BWH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their collaborators describe success in delivering three anti-retrovirals for HIV in a pig model.
To address the challenge of accurately diagnosing chronic pancreatitis (CP), researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have introduced a novel prediction model that combines findings of endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) with pancreatitis-specific behavioral risk factors.
“We asked, can we come up with a more objective way to diagnose chronic pancreatitis?” says Linda Lee, MD, a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy at BWH. “If radiological findings are not obvious for chronic pancreatitis, how do we clinch the diagnosis?”
When a patient arrives for their colonoscopy inadequately prepped, the procedure takes longer to perform, or must be canceled, which interrupts clinical workflow at significant cost.
“To improve patient preparations and decrease no-show rates, a multidisciplinary team at the Endoscopy Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) conducted a three-month pilot study using a texting tool to provide patients with a digital colonoscopy prep guide before their procedure,” said Jennifer Nayor, MD, an attending physician in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy at BWH.
While biologic drugs hold enormous promise for treating a wide range of gastrointestinal disorders, delivering these large molecules into the GI tract is formidable. To address this challenge, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) researcher C. Giovanni Traverso, MB, BChir, PhD, and colleagues have developed an ultrasound method for delivering drugs and macromolecules into the gut. Read More