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Bowel preparation tends to be poor for afternoon colonoscopies, and this can cause procedure failure. But is the performance of colonoscopy in the afternoon also an independent predictor of failure?
Investigators reviewed data from 2083 outpatient colonoscopies, of which 1084 were performed in the morning and 999 were performed in the afternoon. As expected, inadequate bowel preparation was more common in the afternoon than in the morning (19.7% vs. 15.4%; P=0.011), and the incompletion rate was also higher in the afternoon (6.5% vs. 4.1%; P=0.013). When the investigators excluded procedures with poor preparation, afternoon procedures were still more likely than morning procedures to be incomplete (5% vs. 3.2%; P=0.043). The authors recommen…