Second Genoa meeting “Recent Advances on Colorectal Polyps”

Excerpt

The Second Genoa Meeting “Recent Advances on Colorectal Polyps” lectures (April 2014) are now available online. The website [1] can be accessed free of charge (just click on the link below) and includes the talks and slide presentations in high-resolution PDF. The meeting brought together experts from Europe and Japan. The quality of the talks is very impressive; most of the speakers have personally contributed significantly to this field. The material discussed is new and updated to include studies published in the same month the conference took place. A great feature of these lectures is their brevity, averaging less than 15 min each with little to no topic overlap. Basic science and pathology lectures were outstanding with Dr. De Censi on the latest trials of chemo-prevention after polypectomy, Liliana Varesco on the new polyposis syndromes and a thorough review of serrated adenomas. If you want to learn about the latest diagnostic and therapeutic tools in colonoscopy, you should listen to Dr. Galloro and Dr. Matsuda’a lectures (Fig. 1). The “therapeutic” part was not without debate. Most of the controversy was on a very small subset of tumors, the T1 that have penetrated only the proximal part of the submucosa. In these tumors, a combination of histologic features can predict with a 95 % accuracy the absence of involved nodes. There was no doubt among speakers that older patients at moderate to high risk for surgery should have the option of local treatment. However, what local treatment? Speakers were from different planets, Dr Matsuda from “planet ESD”, Dr. Rembacken from “planet EMR”, Dr. Arezzo from “planet TEM” and Dr. Miles from “planet TAMIS”. You can judge for yourself; however, I was convinced by Dr. Rembacken that currently the risks of ESD outweigh the benefits and by Dr. Arezzo that in the rectum the best way to approach advanced polyps is a full thickness excision. Dr. Pucciarelli closed with a lecture on the appropriate surgery for non-FAP polyposis cases. I highly recommend this website to those who want to deepen their knowledge on this topic in a time efficient way and to peruse the slides and their references for further readings. Dr. Gian Andrea Binda is to be commended for rendering such a great service to the international colorectal and medical community.

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