Endoscopy
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ActionabilityPrevalenceStakesEvidence strengthNovelty
See the full rubric →Diagnostic and Clinical Performance of Single-Use Versus Reusable Gastrointestinal Endoscopes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses.
Clinical takeawayMaintain current practice with reusable endoscopes and rigorous reprocessing protocols. Single-use devices offer no diagnostic or technical advantage, and documented infection risk from reusable endoscopes is low. For ERCP specifically, single-use duodenoscopes (EXALT Model D) required conversion to reusable in 7% of procedures, limiting their utility as a standalone option.
What it foundSingle-use endoscopes demonstrated similar or slightly reduced diagnostic accuracy and technical performance compared with reusable models; estimated infection risk from reusable endoscopes was 0.01% to 0.8%, although detection and reporting bias likely affected these estimates.
ContextPrior concerns about pathogen transmission drove interest in single-use endoscopes as a safer alternative. This meta-analysis confirms that properly reprocessed reusable endoscopes carry acceptably low infection risk (0.01-0.8%) and demonstrate comparable or superior diagnostic performance to single-use alternatives.
No standard claimed for this paper
Every paper is compared to the standard governing its question. This one is not: either no standard in the corpus matches it, or the comparison did not hold up on review and was withdrawn rather than published unverified. Both are logged.
Tyldesley-Marshall N … Arasaradnam R · Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology · IF 3.5 · PubMed ↗