Crohn's Disease

In this video exclusive, Tina Aswani Omprakash, a patient advocate with Crohn's disease, discussed how telemedicine changed patient care.

Approximately 3.1 million Americans currently have inflammatory bowel diseases and as many as 70,000 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, according to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation.

I remember being flummoxed as a first-year gastroenterology fellow when we had an elderly patient on service with abdominal pain and weight loss who ended up diagnosed with ileocolonic Crohn’s disease. Our “IBD antennae” are often finely tuned when we see a patient in their late teens or 20s with such symptoms, but maybe not so much in an octogenarian. Indeed, in a recent update of the inception cohorts of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis in Olmsted County, Minnesota, we had noted that two-thirds of Crohn’s disease patients and about 60% of ulcerative colitis patients were diagnosed under the age of 40 years. However, flipping this around, this means that one-third of patients with Crohn’s disease and 40% of patients with UC are diagnosed in their fifth decade of life or later.

In this exclusive video, Edward L. Barnes, MD, MPH, from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discussed a study comparing the use of aminosalicylate monotherapy in older vs. younger patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

Obesity correlated with an increased risk for older-age onset Crohn’s disease but not ulcerative colitis, according to research published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

In a video exclusive, Remo Panaccione, MD, University of Calgary, outlined new therapeutic data for the treatment of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases at the 16th Congress of European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation.

In a real-world Crohn’s disease population, biologic- naive patients, compared with biologic-experienced patients, had a significantly greater chance for achieving mucosal healing, according to research at Digestive Disease Week.

In a recent randomized controlled trial, researchers found that both the specific carbohydrate diet and the Mediterranean diet were associated with improvements in mild to moderate Crohn’s disease symptoms.

Model-informed dosing of Entyvio provided data to maximize endoscopic remission rates among patients with Crohn’s disease, according to research published in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.

Among older patients with inflammatory bowel disease, investigators found deficits in geriatric assessments were highly prevalent, according to a study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.