Anaemia

Hi Everyone

I have had Gerd problems for 18 years then 5 years ago I had a blood test showing slight anaemia and the doc sent me for a endoscopy and colonoscopy which really freaked me out at the time as I have always had this 'cancer phobia'  Anyway both tests came back negative and no further investigations done.  A routing blood test a few weeks ago has shown that I am still 'borderline anaemic' and I had another endoscopy & colonoscopy which were again negative except for a little bit of inflamation (inflammation). The doc now tells me that that colonoscopy cannot see parts of the small bowel and wants to send me for an enteroscopy to look at this part of the bowel to see if there is blood loss from there. As it has been going on for 5 years I am really worried that if they find something serious, it will be too late to do anything about it.
Anyone else had similar problems.

Terry

[boron]

It would be fine to know what anemia exactly you have, so what is RBC, hemoblobin, and ferritin levels.

If there is any, even minor bleeding from anywhere in your gut, this would be seen in fecal occult blood test (FOBT).

Possible causes of anemia in your case:
- some small lesion in stomach, duodenum or esophagus
- reduced absorption of iron, due to inflammed duodenum

Intestinal cancer is almost always colonic cancer, cancers in small intestine are rare.

If you will have capsule endoscopy (enteroscopy), this may reveal eventual inflammation. of small intestine, like from Crohn's disease.