Review Article Capsule Endoscopy for Crohn’s Disease: Current Status of Diagnosis and Management

Copyright © 2016 Dong-Hoon Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Crohn’s disease (CD) is an idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease involving the small and/or large intestine. More than 50 % of Western CD patients and up to 88 % of Asian CD patients may have small intestinal involvement. Video capsule endoscopy (VCE) has a higher diagnostic yield than small bowel barium radiography and computed tomography enterography for the detection of small intestinal involvement of CD. VCE also provides diagnostic yields comparable to magnetic resonance- (MR-) based enterography or enteroclysis andmay have several advantages overMR-based tests for the detection of early small intestinal lesions. Several studies have suggested the use of VCE-based disease activity scoring systems to evaluate small intestinal mucosal disease activity, although their clinical relevance needs to be further studied. A possible indication for VCE is recurrence monitoring after complete surgical excision of CD-involved segments but its usefulness and efficacy compared with conventional endoscopy should be evaluated. The capsule retention rate ranges from 0 to 5.4 % in suspected CD patients and from 0 to 13.2 % in established CD patients. If VCE is necessary, significant small bowel stricture should be ruled out before VCE by performing a patency capsule study and/or small bowel radiological study in suspected or established CD patients. 1