Early drug treatment leads to better outcomes for Crohn’s disease
About 80 per cent of people who received infliximab straight after diagnosis with the inflammatory bowel condition had controlled their symptoms after a year, compared with just 15 per cent of those following a standard regime
By Chen Ly
22 February 2024
Crohn’s disease can cause stomach aches, diarrhoea and weight loss
Jacob Wackerhausen/iStockphoto/Getty Images/www.peopleimages.com
Getting advanced treatment immediately after a Crohn’s disease diagnosis improves patient outcomes, according to a year-long study involving 386 people.
The disease is a life-long inflammatory bowel condition that affects millions of people around the world. Symptoms include stomach aches, diarrhoea, tiredness and weight loss.
Read more
Looking after the fungi in your gut could be key to better health
Advertisement
“These symptoms massively impact people’s quality of life, their education, their relationships, their ability to work and so on,” says Miles Parkes at the University of Cambridge. “We don’t have any cures for it, but we do have some ways to mitigate some of these bad outcomes.”
Treatment often involves dietary changes, immunosuppressants and steroids. In the UK, a medication called infliximab – an antibody that targets specific proteins in the body thought to contribute to gut inflammation – can be prescribed to people who experience regular Crohn’s disease flare-ups or who haven’t responded to other, less-intense treatments.
“That’s a ‘step-up’ approach, where you reactively escalate treatment in response to disease flares,” says Nurulamin Noor, also at the University of Cambridge.
