Gastroscopy in Brisbane

A gastroscopy is performed to investigate, diagnose and treat a number of gastrointestinal conditions. It’s one of the best ways to detect inflammation, ulcers or tumours.

Your doctor may recommend you have a gastroscopy if you regularly have:

• Indigestion
• Upper abdominal pain
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Swallowing difficulties
• Bleeding in the upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

A successful gastroscopy requires a completely empty stomach. That means you can’t eat or drink anything for about 6 hours before your procedure.

If you take regular medication, you may need to adjust it. For example, if you have diabetes, we may need to adjust your medication to ensure that fasting for the procedure doesn’t cause low blood sugar.

Please tell your doctor about your full medical history, including any regular medications you take and any allergies you have.

You’ll be admitted to hospital as a day surgery patient and we’ll complete some pre-procedure observations to check your overall health. Your doctor and anesthetist will meet with you and, once it’s time, you’ll be brought into the operating room.

Depending on your age and medical needs, you may be either lightly or fully sedated before we start the procedure.

You’ll wake up in the recovery room and nurses will regularly check on you over the next few hours. If you’re experiencing any nausea or vomiting after the anaesthetic, your doctor can prescribe some medication to ease those symptoms.

Your surgeon will check in on you and let you know how the procedure went, whether they found anything significant and what happens next.

Once you’re well, you will be discharged.

Please note, someone else must drive you home and remain with you for 24 hours as you continue to recover from your anesthesia. No matter how well you feel, it is illegal to drive while still under the influence of sedatives.

Rest assured that we’ll tell you promptly about anything that we find during your procedure.

Sometimes, everything looks clear, meaning there must be some other explanation for your symptoms. That’s still very useful information.

• Polyps: We remove these benign growths on the inside lining of your upper digestive tract because some of them may become cancerous over time. In this way, gastroscopy helps to prevent some types of cancer from developing.
• Something that needs further investigation: If so, we take a biopsy and send your tissue sample to the laboratory for testing. This does not mean you have cancer – biopsies help to diagnose several conditions.
• Bleeding: If we find that you’re experiencing bleeding at some sites in your upper GI tract, we may try to treat it there and then by injecting medications, applying heat or inserting small clips.