Safety of cold snare polypectomy vs conventional hot polypectomy for 4 to 10 mm gastric polyps: A single-center retrospective study

Endoscopic polypectomy has become standard in the management of most polyps in the gastrointestinal tract, but bleeding is the most common adverse event. Polypectomy with a cold snare (CSP) has been increasingly utilized in recent years, but further evidence is required to establish its safety of gastric polypectomy. The aim of this study was to compare intraprocedure and postprocedure adverse events in patients who underwent CSP vs conventional hot snare polypectomy (HSP) of gastric polyps. Electronic medical records and endoscopy reports of all patients who underwent gastric polypectomy at the Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital between January 2019 and June 2021 were retrospectively reviewed. Data on patient demographics, polyp characteristics, method of polypectomy, and adverse events were collected. A total of 193 gastric polyps removed from 111 patients were reviewed. The mean age was 58.1 years, and 74.8% were female. Of these, 142 polyps were removed from 78 patients by HSP, compared to 51 polyps removed from 33 patients by CSP. The mean polyp size was 7.9 mm in the HSP group and 7.5 mm in the CSP group (P = .306). Nine patients (11.5%) from HSP group and 5 (15.2%) from CSP group presented with immediate bleeding that were managed by endoscopic treatment (P = .755). There was no serious adverse event, such as delayed bleeding or perforation, occurred in this study. In multivariate logistic regression, only the number of polyps resected > 1 was identified as independent risk factor of immediate post-polypectomy bleeding. Therefore, the safety of CSP was non-inferior to HSP and could be an additional option for removal of gastric polyps <= 10 mm.