Two studies published in the American Gastroenterological Association ( AGA ) journal Gastroenterology, found an increase in the prevalence of asthma, arthritis, chronic renal disease, multiple sclerosis and psoriasis, among other disorders.

" These studies remind us that the effects of inflammatory bowel disorders extend to every corner of the body, including the lungs and central nervous system," said Edward V. Loftus, at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. " The findings lend credence to the concept that patients with one chronic inflammatory condition are more likely than the general population to develop another."

Inflammatory bowel disease ( IBD ) is a term that refers to both ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.
According to the data from the National Health Interview Survey, there are more than two million prevalent cases of Crohn's disease and more than one million cases of ulcerative colitis in the U.S.

Ulcerative colitis, a condition in which the lining of the large intestine becomes inflamed and ulcerated, most commonly affects people between 15 and 40 years of age.
Common symptoms include abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea, fever, weight loss and rectal bleeding.
People with chronic, severe ulcerative colitis are at an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer.
Crohn's disease causes chronic inflammation of the intestinal wall.
While the cause of Crohn's is relatively unknown, it usually starts during the teenage years or early adulthood and is characterized by pain in the abdomen, diarrhea and weight loss.


Increased risk of demyelinating diseases in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

A possible association between inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis ( MS ) has been suspected for decades, but previous studies have lacked the statistical power to confirm the relationship.
This study is the first to confirm a nearly two-fold increased risk of multiple sclerosis in IBD patients. In addition to multiple sclerosis, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found an association between inflammatory bowel disease, optic neuritis and other demyelinating disorders.

Patients being treated with anti-TNF alpha therapies, such as Remicade ( Infliximab ) and Humira ( Adalimumab ), were previously thought to be the only ones with an increased risk of developing these neurological disorders.
As a result, clinician and patient label warnings were added to this class of drugs in 2004.
Study authors say the causal relationship between these drugs and demyelinating disorders has not clearly been established because of the small amount of data available from controlled clinical trials.

" While our study findings do not refute an association between anti-TNF alpha medications and these disorders, they point out that IBD patients appear to have an increased risk of multiple sclerosis even when they are not being treated with these medications," said James D. Lewis, study author from the University of Pennsylvania. " The development of neurologic symptoms in patients with IBD should prompt their physician to look for evidence of multiple sclerosis and other nervous system disorders."

This study identified more than 20,000 patients from the UK's General Practice Research Database diagnosed with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis between January 1988 and October 1997. Each study subject was then matched to four controls, making for an inclusion of about 80,000 control subjects without IBD. The odds of an IBD patient being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, optic neuritis and other demyelinating disorders was found to be 1.7 times as high as those patients without IBD. If the association is confirmed by other studies, researchers believe findings may help to identify common genetic or environmental factors contributing to the development of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.


Patients with Crohn's and colitis are at greater risk of asthma

Canadian researchers looked at the relationship between inflammatory bowel disease and common respiratory and neurological diseases.
Results of this study suggest that the people with IBD have a significantly increased prevalence of asthma, bronchitis, arthritis and psoriasis. While some of these co-morbidities have been found previously, this study is the first to discover a significantly higher prevalence of asthma in IBD patients compared with non-IBD patients.

" People with IBD are 1.5 times as likely to have asthma as people in the general population," said Charles N. Bernstein, lead study author from the University of Manitoba in Canada. "Airway diseases are the second most common chronic inflammatory disease assessed in patients with either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis."

Study data comes from the University of Manitoba IBD database, which included 8,072 people diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease over a 19-year period.
Each of these people was matched randomly with 10 members of the general population by age, gender and geographic location.
Ulcerative colitis patients were 50 to 70 percent more likely than the general population to have asthma, while Crohn's patients were about 30 to 40 percent more likely.

Overall, people with IBD had a significantly higher prevalence than the general population for the following disorders: asthma, bronchitis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, chronic renal disease, psoriasis and pericarditis.
This study is the largest population-based study to assess the co-morbidity of these important immune-based diseases.
Differences were not only found between the two diseases, but also in gender and age.
Females had a greater percentage of pulmonary co-morbidities than males and more old people had bronchitis.

Source: American Gastroenterological Association, 2005


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