Ahmed S¹, Vachaparambil C¹, Kugathasan S². Curr Opin Gastroenterol. 2019 Apr 22. doi: 10.1097/MOG.0000000000000548. [Epub ahead of print]

Author information

1 Division of Gastroentology, Department of Medicine.

2 Division of Pediatric Gastroentology, Department of Pediatrics, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Abstract

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Prospective and inception inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) cohorts offer excellent opportunities to develop risk stratification strategies, use relevant tissue to explore the biology of IBD progression, and study the natural history of IBD in the era of biological therapy. Adult IBD care can learn important lessons from recent pediatric IBD studies.

RECENT FINDINGS: A recent multicenter inception cohort of pediatric IBD patients examining genetic, serologic, and microbiome data at diagnosis has been able to create a model for prediction of disease complications, describe compositional changes in gut microbiota associated with disease severity, identify markers of intestinal fibrosis, and confirm how important early life environmental exposures affect disease severity and phenotype. Analysis of gene and protein expression in mucosal samples has been shown to offer both diagnostic information about differentiation of ulcerative colitis (UC) vs. crohn's disease as well as implications for treatment efficacy. Important developments in treatment of growth failure with antitumor necrosis factor therapy, the effect of oral medication noncompliance, and dietary IBD therapy are outlined.

SUMMARY: Pediatric IBD research has been focusing on better phenotyping at diagnosis, and development of molecular signatures of future disease behavior by using relevant intestinal tissue rather than blood. This has moved IBD from being a heterogeneous group of diseases with an unknown disease course to a better-defined condition in which patients are accurately risk stratified and treated based on individualized distinct biological and clinical information.