American College of Gastroenterology

In a new poster presented at the annual ACG meeting in San Antonio, researchers compare morbidity and mortality for ulcerative colitis patients with or without C. diff or CMV infections.

People are very debilitated by these recurrent cycles of infection and FMT gives them their lives back.

C. Difficile is big. It has surpassed MRSA as the most common hospital acquired infection.

Could treating patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) be as simple as changing their diet?

Fecal micriobiota transplant has been moving into mainstream medicine even without any randomonized placebo controlled trials showing it works for treating recurrent C. difficile infection. Now a long-awaited trial confirms that it works.

Altered gut microbes are implicated in an increased susceptibility to C. difficile infection, researchers reported at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientific Meeting in Honolulu.

Some microbes are more associated with specific irritable bowel disease symptoms than others, researchers reporting at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientic Meeting reported.

Treatments for irritable bowel system are proliferating. In addition to new drugs, more drug candidates are entering the approval pipeline. Even as physicians await these new products, their patients are getting into the act by doing internet research and other reading-and tv watching-that has them trying unproven remedies with mixed results.

The American College of Gastroenterology is not optimistic that its staff's lobbying efforts to head off a reduction in the amount Medicare will reimburse physicians for performing a colonoscopy will succeed.

A conversation between ASGE President Douglas Faigel, MD and CMS looks to produce some interesting feedback and clarity in the next two months. Faigel said, "We're starting to win the war on colon cancer and the last thing we want to do is put up barriers for patient Medicare beneficiary access to colonoscopies."

Maintenance of certification (MOC) is a touchy issue for the profession of gastroenterology. Outgoing president of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Stephen Hanauer, MD, has assured members that the organization is confident it has reached an agreement with the ABIM that will "put on hold some of the more burdensome aspects of the 'maintenance' process."

Pancreatic cancer is a difficult disease to treat successfully. For urban African Americans, that picture may be even worse, a Georgia researcher and colleagues found. Their report, subtitled "Too Young, Too Late" was presented today at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientific Meeting in Honolulu.

The numbers are in on studies of a new diagnostic called PancraGen's ability to distinguish pancreatic malignancies from other findings in pancreatic cysts.

It's a constant question of whether physician decision making has benefitted the patients or not.

The molecular test PancraGen helps identify false negative cases that could be missed by first-line tests like imaging, cytology and fluid chemistry.

The effective arsenal of antivirals for hepatitis C just keeps getting bigger and better. Speaking at the American College of Gastroenterology meeting in Honolulu, experts are anticipating new drugs that will work for all six hepatitis virus genotypes. Meanwhile, matching patients to drugs can be complicated.

IBS patients are great, because many times they come to you frustrated they don't have a "diagnosis".

The probiotics didn't work well enough to cure patients, but the stool transplants miraculously did.

Pennies, chicken bones, and dishwasher cleaning powders. Gastroenterologists who work at hospitals are likely to get called in when people either accidentally or purposefully swallow something they should not. At the American College of Gastroenterology Annual Scientific Meeting in Honolulu, a physician at NYU Langone Medical Center offered a treatment primer.

All physicians want to deliver quality care. But do the checklists required to measure quality really add up to giving patients the results they want? As the American College of Gastroenterology Annual Scientific Meeting gets underway in Honolulu, the question came up in the context of managing irritable bowel disease.

Pancreatic cancer is hard to cure and even diagnosing it is challenging. Among the eagerly awaiting research topics to be presented at the American College of Gastroenterology Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii are reports on new developments in detecting malignancies.

More than three-quarters of intravenous drug users and Baby Boomers tested for hepatitis C were positive and unaware they were infected, according to results of a study published in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Air pollution affects liver health and can cause fibrosis, according to findings published in the Journal of Hepatology.

Though it is still in development, a blood test may be able to detect pancreatic cancer in early stages, according to a proof of concept study published in Cancer Prevention Research.

Xi E. Zheng, MD, PhD, shares her views on young-onset colorectal cancer at 2014 ACG Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Monika Fischer, MD, talks about focusing research on patients with more severe IBD symptoms at 2014 ACG Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Monika Fischer, MD, discusses the outcomes of a study assessing fecal microbiota transplantation for c. difficile infection at the 2014 ACG Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Carol Burke, MD, FACG, FASGE, talks about her phase-3 placebo-controlled trial of Celecoxib in pediatric subjects with familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) at the 2014 ACG Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Carol Burke, MD, FACG, FASGE, discusses pediatric familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) and colorectal cancer at the 2014 ACG Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Study results show that eluxadoline may be useful in patients with diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D) who do not achieve symptom relief with loperamide.