Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Higher visceral adipose tissue correlated with lower rates of inflammatory bowel disease remission among patients dosed with infliximab, vedolizumab or ustekinumab, according to Andres Yarur, MD, Medical College of Wisconsin.

Avoidance of cephalosporins and penicillin with beta-lactamase inhibitors during anti-TNF therapy reduced the risk for anti-drug antibodies among patients with inflammatory bowel disease, according to research published in Gut.

New gastrointestinal symptoms among patients with inflammatory bowel disease and COVID-19 did not correlate with an increased risk for death.

Cerecor reported positive initial results from a trial analyzing CERC-002 for the treatment of patients with moderate to severe Crohn’s disease, according to a press release.

Obesity was not associated with an increased risk for serious infection among patients with inflammatory bowel disease treated with biologics, according to research published in Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology.

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.

Healio Gastroenterology presents the following report on the top peer-tested stories in June.

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease who switched from one infliximab biosimilar to another had no significant change in disease activity, according to research published in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

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.