Improving Outcomes of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an autoimmune disease that involves the gastrointestinal tract and can affect multiple organ systems in the human body. It is classified into two main types, Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Taking care of patients with IBD can be faced by multiple challenges, including symptomatic treatment, medication monitoring, managing interaction of IBD with other comorbidities, and preventing long term complications, like implementing colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. Additionally, in the last two decades, there have been advances in managing these patients in terms of treatment, as well as improvement in diagnostic and screening techniques.(1) Consequently, this raised more challenges, such as changing in body habitus of these patients,(2) and increased the demand to examine the quality of the enormous amount of data that become available. Our research group has tackled multiple areas of these challenges. I will be presenting two projects of our research works in this thesis. While in the first paper we analyzed the existing data to find the evidence behind using advanced visual technology in performing colonoscopy for CRC screening in patients with IBD. In the second paper, we studied the effect of obesity on the outcomes of hospitalized patients with UC.