VIDEO: Lessons in ulcerative colitis care learned from COVID-19 pandemic

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify iwaters@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Like most others, I think we've learned a great deal about the treatment and diagnosis of ulcerative colitis during this pandemic that has plagued us for the last year and two months now. And in particular, I think patients with immune-mediated inflammatory disorders like ulcerative colitis, we're concerned, a lot of them are on therapies that modulate the immune system, that are on different biologic therapies, physicians. We're concerned about [patients], are they at greater risk for COVID or are they a greater risk for worse outcomes if they were to get it? And I think we've learned a couple of good things and it's mostly good news. Patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's are not at increased risk for developing COVID that the medications short of prednisone really don't appear to impact negatively outcomes if patients were to develop COVID-19.

And in fact, I really tell patients more so than usual it's important to get them well, to keep them well, sort of keep them out of the hospital and keep them off of prednisone. That we use the same therapies, the biologics, the immunomodulators as we would have prior to the pandemic, short even getting patients off prednisone. We did that before, we're even more aggressive about doing it now. I think we learned a little bit more to use some non-invasive testing like fecal calprotectin as opposed to bringing patients in for sigmoidoscopies and colonoscopies, unless really necessary, particularly at the height of the pandemic. And obviously, like everybody else, get your vaccine.