Endoscopic biliary drainage has been established as the palliative treatment of choice for malignant obstructive iaundice. But the clogging of biliary endoprosthesis has been a persistent problem faced by endoscopists over many years. Different
materials, sizes, and designs have been used in efforts to overcome this problem. Recently, there are some reports that incorporating sideholes increases the risk of stent clogging, and prostheses without sideholes had significantly lower
clogging
compared to those with sideholes. And then Soehendra and his colleagues introduced a new design Teflon straight stent without sideholes, designated "Tannenbaum" (TB) stents, and reported that TB stent had significantly longer patency than Teflon
pigtail
stent with sideholes. When placing the TB stent, we used OASISTM(One Action Stent Introduction System). This introducer enables the stent to be pre-loaded onto the distal tip of the guiding catheter and placed endoscopically in one step. By using
OASISTM, we reduced the duration of placing the stent in narrowed bile duct and the patients were more tolerable.
Now, we report our experience of endoscopic retrograde biliary drainage by use of TB stent and OASISTM in 12 patients with obstructive jaundice due to malignancy.
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