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Crohn’s & Colitis Congress: Offering physicians ‘a new way’ to view IBD
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LAS VEGAS — Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease will be onsite at the Bellagio starting February 7 as a media partner for the Crohn’s & Colitis Congress, bringing the latest in inflammatory bowel disease news to our daily feed.
The Congress, according to David T. Rubin, MD, AGAF, section chief of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, and co-director of the Digestive Diseases Center at the University of Chicago Medicine and organizing committee co-chair of the Crohn’s & Colitis Congress, received more than 200 novel research abstracts for presentation.
“There will be oral abstract presentations in each of the main sessions throughout the meeting and an extensive and interactive poster session where we had a separate group working on how the poster session could be more interactive and to get more people to discuss the science in the poster auditorium,” Rubin said in an interview. “I had the pleasure of seeing the abstracts that were selected and ranked recently and there’s some great new things that will be presented at the meeting.”
New this year
One of the areas that the Congress focused on for this upcoming meeting was significantly changing the faculty.
“About 60% to 65% of the faculty will be new, so there will be new and updated information and different perspectives provided at the congress,” D. Brent Polk, MD, AGAF, an attending physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and organizing committee chair of the Crohn’s & Colitis Congress, said in an interview. “If you came last year, there’s even more reason to come this year.”
Additionally, as Maria T. Abreu, MD, AGAF, division chief of gastroenterology at University of Miami Health System and organizing committee co-chair of the Crohn’s & Colitis Congress told Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease, a new component of the meeting is the incorporation of patient participation.
“[During] some of the breakout sessions, there will be a whole panel of people and that should give richness to the discussion,” she said. “Some of these people will include patients during the breakout sessions so that clinicians can hear from a patient’s perspective what is important. This is the first meeting that I am aware of that is including patients in some of the panel discussions on managing the disease.”
Congress Highlights
One area of emphasis that will kick off the Congress will be talk about how to make sense of clinical care guidelines, according to Polk.
“We will have an international panel that includes interdisciplinary expertise, including pediatricians, surgeons, psychologists, and clinicians in managing what sort of guidelines are out there for providing standard best practice care for patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease,” he said.
Rubin also acknowledged that the session on understanding clinical guidelines will be important for attendees to sit in on.
“What we realized is that a lot of times attendees may get a skewed view of patient management because a speaker brings to the podium some of their own biases,” he said. “This session will really put into perspective where the guidelines are for different types of IBD and how we can incorporate them better into our practice.”
Abreu said that one of the many sessions she is looking forward to is on treating patients with complicated IBD.
“In all fields of medicine, there are patients who walk through your office who have been through everything,” she said. “Our meeting is going to have a whole half-day on how to deal with the most complicated patients. And in particular, we are going to highlight what we are doing with people who develop blockages in their intestine. We’re going to go soup to nuts, from how and when you operate on them to some very exciting new stuff on what causes the gut to become strictured and narrowed. We have been able to treat inflammation, but we really have not made as much of a difference in people who develop strictures of their intestine. I think if we can fix that, that will go a long way to improving symptoms.”
More than just CME
Rubin said that although the Congress will include CME opportunities, it will involve so much more.
“This is really meant to be the one-stop shop for the science of IBD at the highest level and the clinical care updates in IBD at the highest level,” he said. “Whether you’re a busy clinician or a junior working on their first grant, or first paper, you’re going to find like-minded people, you’re going to have workshops where you can learn new skills, and you’re going to head home with a new way to look at the diseases and change the world for people who are living with these conditions.” – by Ryan McDonald