Brooks Cash, MD: Reactions to ACG 2019 Research

In an interview with MD Magazine® at ACG 2019, Brooks Cash, MD, chief of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, shared some of the high points of the annual meeting.

MD Magazine: What was the highlight of ACG 2019 for you?

Cash: Well, there's a lot of interesting things being presented at the meeting this year. There is some important information with regards to fatty liver and of course, inflammatory bowel disease has a really important place in my own area of interest.

I'm probably most interested in some data that's being presented at a symposium that I'm moderating later today. And that is a study on human milk oligosaccharides as a potential therapy for irritable bowel syndrome showing significant improvement in symptoms and quality of life of patients who were given this therapy.

So, certainly evolving. We're starting to kind of break the mold from traditional pharmacologic therapies for a lot of our commonly seen conditions and I think the science is going to continue to prove to push that way.

MD Magazine: You presented a poster here at ACG about patient experience with NER1006 as a bowel preparation for colonoscopy. What were the key findings of that study?

Cash: Yeah, I presented the poster on PLENVU, which is that preparation. It's a newly available commercially available bowel prep and it's the lowest volume bowel prep for colonoscopy on the market in the United States at the current time.

It's basically 500 cc of prep followed by 500 cc of fluid. And patients will do that either in a split dose fashion, meaning they'll do 1 dose on the night before the colonoscopy and then the second dose the morning of or they can do it in the same day. Get up early in the morning and drink everything.

We presented the first real world experience with that. What we found was that the vast majority of patients, about three-quarters, actually said that they were very satisfied with the prep, they found that the volume was appropriate.

They actually liked the taste or wouldn't say they enjoyed the taste, but they didn't find the taste is distasteful. It didn't prevent them from completing the prep, 98% of them completed the most or all of the prep.

And then specifically when we asked patients who had had previous colonoscopies and done other preps, which they preferred, and of course, there's a potential for recall bias there.

The majority of them actually preferred this low volume prop. So not a head to head comparison. It's experiential, and it's based on those that patient’s previous experiences.

But, you know, I think what we have is a clear marker that our patients want a lower volume, more palatable prep. And really the best prep is the 1 that the patients will complete and actually adhere to so that we get the best and the optimal results of the bowel prep so that we can then in turn do the provide optimal results with colonoscopy.