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©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Pharmacol Ther. Aug 6, 2015; 6(3): 84-88
Published online Aug 6, 2015. doi: 10.4292/wjgpt.v6.i3.84
Beverage intake preference and bowel preparation laxative taste preference for colonoscopy
Adeyinka O Laiyemo, Clinton Burnside, Maryam A Laiyemo, John Kwagyan, Carla D Williams, Kolapo A Idowu, Hassan Ashktorab, Angesom Kibreab, Victor F Scott, Andrew K Sanderson
Adeyinka O Laiyemo, Hassan Ashktorab, Angesom Kibreab, Victor F Scott, Andrew K Sanderson, Department of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC 20060, United States
Clinton Burnside, Carla D Williams, Kolapo A Idowu, Howard University Cancer Center, Washington, DC 20060, United States
Maryam A Laiyemo, Department of Biological Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Howard University, Washington, DC 20060, United States
John Kwagyan, Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translations Science, Washington, DC 20060, United States
Author contributions: All authors contributed to this manuscript.
Supported by In part, the Bridge Funds and Pilot Study Awards Program of Howard University, No. U400043; by grant awards from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, Nos. KL2TR000102-04 and UL1RT000101; from the National Institute for Diabetes, Digestive Diseases and Kidney, No. R21DK100875; and National Institutes of Health (to Dr. Laiyemo AO).
Institutional review board statement: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Howard University, Washington DC (Reference = IRB-12-MED-17).
Informed consent statement: All participants gave written informed consent prior to participation.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None.
Data sharing statement: No.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Adeyinka O Laiyemo, MD, MPH, Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine, 2041 Georgia Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20060, United States.
adeyinka.laiyemo@howard.edu
Telephone: +1-202-8657186 Fax: +1-202-8654607
Received: March 16, 2015
Peer-review started: March 18, 2015
First decision: April 10, 2015
Revised: May 26, 2015
Accepted: June 9, 2015
Article in press: June 11, 2015
Published online: August 6, 2015
Processing time: 145 Days and 8.8 Hours
AIM: To examine whether non-alcoholic beverage intake preferences can guide polyethylene glycol (PEG)-based bowel laxative preparation selection for patients.
METHODS: We conducted eight public taste test sessions using commercially procured (A) unflavored PEG, (B) citrus flavored PEG and (C) PEG with ascorbate (Moviprep). We collected characteristics of volunteers including their beverage intake preferences. The volunteers tasted the laxatives in randomly assigned orders and ranked the laxatives as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd based on their taste preferences. Our primary outcome is the number of 1st place rankings for each preparation.
RESULTS: A total of 777 volunteers completed the study. Unflavored PEG was ranked as 1st by 70 (9.0%), flavored PEG by 534 (68.7%) and PEG with ascorbate by 173 (22.3%) volunteers. Demographic, lifestyle characteristics and beverage intake patterns for coffee, tea, and carbonated drinks did not predict PEG-based laxative preference.
CONCLUSION: Beverage intake pattern was not a useful guide for PEG-based laxative preference. It is important to develop more tolerable and affordable bowel preparation laxatives for colonoscopy. Also, patients should taste their PEG solution with and without flavoring before flavoring the entire gallon as this may give them more opportunity to pick a pattern that may be more tolerable.
Core tip: There is a need to improve patients’ experience with bowel preparation process in order to optimize both colonoscopy uptake. Polyethelene glycol (PEG) is the most widely used laxative but many patients do not readily tolerate it because of its taste. We evaluated whether beverage intake preference pattern can be a useful guide for predicting tolerability of bowel preparation laxative in multiple public taste tests. Our study suggested that no demographic or lifestyle factors predicted bowel preparation taste preference for PEG-based preparations. We recommend that patients should taste PEG formulation before flavoring it to assist them in choosing a more tolerable pattern of ingestion.
