ACG Investigators Identify Factors Linked to Colectomies

Why do some patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have to undergo colectomies and what can be done to better forecast who will require the surgery?

During the American College of Gastroenterology’s Annual Scientific Meeting (ACG 2019), Miguel Regueiro, MD, chair of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic, and George Khoudari, MD, a physician with the Cleveland Clinic, discuss in an interview with MD Magazine® the colectomy predictor population-based cohort study and what it will be used for in the future.

MD Magazine: What is the importance of the study?

Regueiro: The importance of the study and the reason that we entertained this study at all was that there are still patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease who need surgery and specifically need a colectomy.

One of the things we were interested in looking at was what are potentially some of these predictors of colectomy in these patients. Maybe if we could identify those predictors we could better determine who may need surgery or who may respond to medications.

MD Magazine: What was the methodology used in the study?

Khoudari: So we did this study using the inpatient database and we looked at patients with IBD. We also looked at the patients who had colectomy.

We had a total of 3.5 million patients who had IBD, 71,000 of these patients had colectomies and we looked at the predictors for colectomy in these patients.

MD Magazine: What were the results of colectomy predictor study?

Khoudari: So IBD patients who are young, male, African American have a higher risk of colectomy. Also, IBD patients with infections like Clostridium difficile, cytomegalovirus also are at high risk of colectomies.

MD Magazine: How will the study be used in the future to improve patient outcomes?

Khoudari: So in this database we can look for associations, but we can look for mechanism for why this has happened.