Objective Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube placement is associated with a high risk of cardiorespiratory complications in patients with significant respiratory compromise. This study reports a case series of high-risk patients undergoing PEG placement using a modified technique—nasal unsedated seated PEG (nuPEG) placement.

Design Retrospective review of 67 patients at high risk of complications undergoing PEG placement between September 2012 and December 2016.

Setting UK specialist tertiary centre for clinical nutrition support.

Interventions Patients underwent ‘push’ PEG placement using nasal endoscopy without sedation in a seated position.

Main outcome measures Procedural success and tolerability, short term (within 24 hours), medium term (24 hours to 30 days) complications and survival were recorded.

Results 67 patients underwent 68 nuPEG placements. The majority had motor neuron disease (46/67). One patient developed a lower respiratory tract infection the following day. Two patients experienced accidental displacement of their PEG within 2 weeks. One patient died within 30 days of nuPEG insertion due to reasons unrelated to the procedure. Endoscopic comfort scores of 1 or 2 (98.0%) indicated good tolerance. A failure rate of 10.5% was attributed to intrathoracic displacement of the stomach, almost certainly due to the advanced stage of the neurological disease and associated diaphragmatic weakness.

Conclusions Our experience with the nuPEG technique suggests that it is safe and well tolerated in high-risk patients. As a result, it has now entirely supplanted radiologically inserted gastrostomy insertion in our institution and we recommend it as the method of choice for gastrostomy tube insertion in such patients.