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IBD incidence in elderly as high as general adult population
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Patients older than 60 years still have a high incidence of inflammatory bowel disease, according to population-based data in the United States.
Kian Keyashian, MD, from Stanford Health Care, and colleagues used multiregional data to explore incidence rates of IBD in different age groups. Research in the U.S. in this area has been limited because of a lack of nationwide registries.
“In the U.S. and worldwide the incidence of IBD has been best described in the adult population, those patients between the ages of 18 and 65,” Keyashian said in a video abstract. “Data on the patients at the extremes of age, those that are pediatric patients and those that are elderly, over the age of 65, is much more limited.”
Researchers analyzed data from the Optum Research Database to identify patients with incident IBD with a disease-free interval of 1.5 years between 2005 and 2015 (n = 60,247). They calculated overall and age-specific incidence rates for four different age groups; pediatric (0–17 years), young adult (18–25 years), adult (26–59 years) and elderly (> 60 years).
The mean incidence rate for the entire cohort was 37.5 per 100,000 person-years between 2005 and 2015. The adult and elderly cohorts had the two highest incidence rates (36.4/100,000 and 36.7/100,000, respectively). The incidence rate increased over the 10-year study period for all age groups.
While patients in the adult and elderly groups were more likely to be diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, patients in the pediatric and young adult cohorts were more likely to be diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Patients in the elderly cohort also had less perianal CD than the adult group (20.8% vs. 22.3%; P < .05).
Keyashian said these data could prove beneficial in the diagnosis of IBD, particularly in the elderly population, which regularly experiences diagnostic delays.
“We do find incident IBD in the elderly population just as commonly as we find in the adult population,” he said. “As such, we must be vigilant of this diagnosis and include it into differential diagnosis of a presentation. Elderly patients are known to have atypical presentations, and that means we need to keep this diagnosis in mind when we are exploring possible causes of symptoms.” – by Alex Young
Disclosures: Keyashian reports no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the full study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.
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