Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risks
By Mayo Clinic staffCapsule endoscopy is a safe procedure that carries few risks. Risks include:
Poor quality images
In some cases, the images collected by the capsule endoscopy may be obscured by food or waste in your digestive tract. If the images aren't clear, you may need to repeat the capsule endoscopy. Your doctor may ask that you undergo a bowel-cleansing process before you repeat the capsule endoscopy.
You can increase your chances of having clear images by fasting before your capsule endoscopy. Follow your doctor's instructions about food and water intake before your procedure.
A capsule that becomes lodged in the digestive tract
In most cases, the capsule that contains the tiny camera will leave your body when you have a bowel movement later in the day or within several days. In rare cases, the capsule can become lodged in your digestive tract.
The risk is thought to be small — 1 to 5 percent of people undergoing capsule endoscopy may experience capsule retention. Put another way, this means that for every 100 people who undergo capsule endoscopy, as many as five may still have the capsule in their bodies after two weeks. The risk may be slightly higher in people known to have Crohn's disease.
If the capsule hasn't yet passed and you're not experiencing any signs and symptoms due to capsule retention, your doctor may wait to see whether the capsule will eventually leave your body on its own. Capsules causing signs and symptoms that indicate bowel obstruction must be removed. Depending on where the capsule is stuck, you may need to undergo surgery to remove the capsule.
