Aug 14, 2008 12:14 am US/Eastern
'Pill-Cam' Helps Diagnose Disease In Children
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Electronics and cameras keep getting smaller and smaller, but would you believe there's now a camera you can swallow? It's actually a medical device that's helping doctors diagnose serious stomach problems in children.
John Liberto, an eighth grader on Long Island, N.Y., was a very active, sports-loving, honor roll student until about four years ago.
"He just started to get very, very tired," said Nicolette Liberto, John's mother. "He laid on the couch and wouldn't get up and it was the summer. He wouldn't go swimming, wouldn't swim, wouldn't see his friends."
According to John, it wasn't that he didn't want to do all those fun activities. He simply couldn't.
"It's just a lot of pain in the stomach, like a really bad stomach ache and you have to go to the bathroom a lot," he says.
It turned out that John had developed Crohn's disease, an inflammation of his gastrointestinal tract. His small intestine was shown bleeding and ulcerated when images were taken of it. But how exactly do doctors get pictures like those?
It's through a tiny camera in a pill. In fact, the pill is actually a strobe light, battery, TV transmitter, and a camera. It transmits images to a hard drive the patient wears on their belt which is later uploaded to the doctor's computer.
"It magnifies the lining of the GI tract about eight times, and it takes two pictures per second so at the end you have about 50,000 images of the GI tract to really see if there were any subtle changes that could explain some of the reasons why they went to the pediatrician," says Dr. Robin Sokolow of New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Doctors can use a scope to look at the stomach from above and the colon from below, but only the pill cam can show them pictures of the more than 20 feet of small intestine in between. A recent study found that pillcam pictures actually changed the diagnosis and treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.
"Those children that they did make those changes to actually had significantly better outcomes," says Dr. Sokolow.
And things are working out for John Liberto now too.
"I'm feeling so much better now because all last week I was in the hospital because I flared up and got really, really sick," he says.
John is now in remission after Dr. Sokolow changed his medication.
The pill-cam costs about $400 and is usually covered by insurance. Once it passes out, it's not reused.
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