Pediatric Unsedated Transnasal Endoscopy Improves Recovery
Eunice Odiase, MD, discusses transnasal endoscopy
Eunice Odiase, MD: My name is Eunice Odiase and I am a pediatric gastroenterologist and investigator here at UVA Health Children's Hospital.
So, unsedated transnasal endoscopy, or TNE, is a procedure that we use to interrogate the esophagus, stomach, and the small intestines. We can go through the nose and interrogate the entire GI tract.
Patients don't have to go through a long recovery afterwards and they can get up and go to school right after the procedure. Additionally, what we use, because we do not use anesthesia or sedation, we just use lidocaine in the nose.
And for kids, what we'll do is we'll put on virtual reality goggles and patients will watch their favorite movie or their favorite show. And so, using distraction techniques, we're able to do the entire procedure and grab biopsies.
We use TNE to diagnose a wide variety of GI diseases. So, whether that's eosinophilic esophagitis, EoE, in the esophagus, other eosinophilic diseases in the GI tract, bacterial, inflammatory diseases in the stomach, autoimmune diseases in the small intestine, such as celiac disease, we can use TNE to diagnose that.
So, UVA Health has become a leader in this space because there are actually only a limited amount of programs that offer unsedated transnasal endoscopy. So, because of that, we have patients who come from all over the Commonwealth who are wanting to come to UVA for this procedure.
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