Crohn’s disease more prevalent among pediatric patients with hidradenitis suppurativa

Key takeaways:

• Pediatric patients with hidradenitis suppurativa experience a 4.11 times higher prevalence of Crohn’s disease than healthy controls.
• After adjusting for covariates, prevalence increased.

Pediatric patients with hidradenitis suppurativa are more than four times more likely to have Crohn’s disease compared with those without hidradenitis suppurativa, according to a study.

“Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) and Crohn’s disease (CD) are chronic, recurrent, inflammatory disorders with shared genetic susceptibility and immunologic features,” Nicole Mastacouris, MS, of the department of dermatology at Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, and colleagues wrote. “Population-based studies have found an association between CD and HS in adults; however, this association is poorly characterized among pediatric patients.”

In this study, the authors used data from IBM Explorys to compare the prevalence of CD among pediatric patients with and without HS.

A total of 2,883 patients with HS (mean age, 16 years; 83% girls) and 222,186 patients without HS (mean age, 15 years; 52% girls) aged 12 to 17 years were included in the study.

The researchers found that CD was prevalent in 0.69% of patients with HS vs. 0.17% of patients without HS. This means that those with HS were more than four times more likely to have CD (unadjusted prevalence ratio = 4.11; 95% CI, 2.63-6.44).

After adjusting for age, sex and other factors, the CD prevalence ratio among those with HS vs. those without HS increased to 4.9 (95% CI, 3.07-7.84).

CD prevalence was also 0.73% in patients aged 15 to 17 years, the most common age group in the study, compared with 0.2% prevalence in controls. After adjusting for covariates, the prevalence of CD among patients aged 15 to 17 years was 4.84 times higher than their healthy counterparts (95% CI, 2.95-7.96).

While the researchers concluded that CD was much more common among pediatric patients with HS, they reassured patients and practitioners that CD is still a rare condition across all groups.

“Findings of this study suggest an association between CD and HS in pediatric patients,” the authors wrote. “However, the low absolute prevalence of CD in this group is reassuring and should be taken into context when counseling patients.”