Ulcerative colitis in Madrid, Spain: Current management

✍ Scribed by Pilar López-Serrano; Jóse Lázaro Pérez-Calle; Conrado Fernández-Rodríguez

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 47 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1078-0998
• DOI: 10.1002/ibd.21237

✦ Synopsis

We read with great interest the study by Barreiro et al. 1 It provides valuable information about the current status of ulcerative colitis (UC), in particular about its medical management. Few studies address this issue in UC, an interesting issue in understanding the current practice in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the role of new and old treatments. The present study completes the picture painted by Barreiro et al.

Hospital Fundacio ´n Alcorco ´n is a tertiary hospital in southwest Madrid (in the middle of Spain). It provides assistance to 19 municipalities and 264,000 inhabitants, and IBD patients have been attended in a monographic unit since 2002. Assistance in this area is eminently public and reflects the current situation of the disease in our area. We collected data on IBD patients in an access database prepared for that purpose from 2004 to 2008. All patients included in this register met Lennard-Jones criteria. We used the Montreal Classification for stratification of the disease and data collected included gender, date of diagnosis and symptom onset, extraintestinal manifestations, current smoking status, treatments, and surgery. Ethics approval for the study was obtained from the local committee.

Statistical analysis was carried out using SPSS v. 13 (Chicago, IL). A chi-square test, Fisher's exact test for small samples, and the Mann-Whitney U-test for heterogeneous samples were used for analysis.

A total of 200 patients with UC were included. We observed, as in the Por-