Oral Drug for Small Intestinal Angiodysplasia Bleeding: Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining!!

Abstract

Because of both difficulties in accurate diagnosis and appropriate management, small bowel bleeding due to angiodysplasia remains a challenging and perplexing issue in clinical practice. Advancement in small bowel endoscopy including capsule endoscopy as well as balloon enteroscopy has expanded the domain of endoscopic hemostatic interventions in the small bowel. This has led on to marked improvement in immediate homeostasis rates in patients with small bowel angiodysplasias (SBA) bleeding. However, high recurrent bleeding rates are an important limitation of endoscopic interventions. Therefore, there is an unmet need of an effective therapeutic as well as prophylactic pharmacotherapy that can alter the course of the disease. Long-acting octreotide as well as thalidomide has been used in patients with SBA bleeding with encouraging results, but the evidence on their efficacy is not robust. In news and views of this issue, we discuss a randomized controlled study that investigates the efficacy and safety of thalidomide for the treatment of recurrent bleeding due to SBA.

Keywords

• capsule endoscopy
• enteroscopy
• angiodysplasia
• octreotide
• thalidomide