Letter: Patient Description of Rectal Effluents With Photographic Examples as a Predictive Indicator for the Quality of Bowel Preparation

predict the quality of bowel preparation before colonoscopic examination, this would be a very useful time-saving and cost-saving method. In the case of a prediction of inadequate preparation, these patients may benefit from additional preparation, which may be particularly useful if it can be administered in the endoscopy unit followed by colonoscopy on the same day. Fatima et al. reported only a slight agreement between the patients’ descriptions of rectal effluent and the bowel preparation quality, but patients reporting rectal effluent as brown liquid or solid have a substantial likelihood of inadequate preparation. So et al. developed a new scoring method that could describe rectal effluent more objectively and accurately, and evaluated its efficacy in predicting the quality of bowel preparation. They showed that photographic example-guided patient descriptions of rectal effluents showed a statistically significant association with the quality of bowel preparation. I believe this method may be slightly too complex and difficult to apply to the general population. The high drop-out rate (68.1%) in this study may be related to this. (In the text, the reasons for exclusion were not described fully.) Identifying the exact grade of the last three rectal effluents by photographic examples may be difficult, especially in patients with patient-related risk factors for inadequate bowel preparation. Matching only the last rectal effluent with photographic Patient Description of Rectal Effluents With Photographic Examples as a Predictive Indicator for the Quality of Bowel Preparation