Case 5: Chosen Therapy
Cindy Law, MD, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the chosen therapy in this case of ulcerative colitis in a pregnant patient:
Editor’s note: The following is an automatically generated transcript of the above video.
“To summarize, this is a biologic-naive pregnant patient with moderate to severe ulcerative colitis. Over the past few years, her disease course has been fluctuating requiring intermittent steroid use while on mesalamine. For the treatment of moderate to severe UC. The options typically include biologics or small molecules. However, due to our pregnancy, small molecules were avoided given limited safety data during pregnancy, especially since other safe options were available.
Infliximab (Remicade, Janssen) was chosen due to its efficacy in inducing remission and rapid onset of action. The patient was particularly concerned about medication safety and was reassured that infliximab is the biologic with the most extensive experience in treating IBD. Lastly, combination therapy was not pursued as initiating thiopurines or methotrexate is contraindicated in pregnancy.”