17 May, 2023.

Preliminary results from a University of Queensland (UQ) study to assess how the Atmo Gas Capsule compares to established SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) diagnostic methods suggest a good correlation with duodenal aspirate and higher accuracy than a breath test.

Dr Ayesha Shah, a senior lecturer at the UQ School of Medicine, presented data from the study, led by Professor Gerald Holtmann, also from UQ, and Professor Uday Chand Ghoshal of Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, India, in a presentation at Digestive Disease Week (DDW), held May 6-9 in Chicago.

In the study, patients undergoing an endoscopy to investigate chronic upper gastrointestinal symptoms also ingested the Atmo capsule, undertook a glucose breath test and had duodenal aspirate collected for culturing.

Using the aspirate obtained during the endoscopy as the ‘gold standard’ for identifying SIBO, the Atmo capsule achieved 91 per cent specificity and 75 per cent sensitivity for an overall accuracy of 83 per cent as compared to culture of aspirate. This was significantly better than the results obtained for breath testing, which had 82 per cent specificity and 12 per cent sensitivity, for an overall accuracy of 47 per cent.

Commenting on the encouraging results, Dr Shah said the next steps included increasing the study sample size and investigating the use of the Atmo capsule to identify patients who respond to antibiotic therapy following diagnosis.