Inflammatory bowel disease is a specific chronic inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD for short, which mainly includes Crohn’s disease (UC) and ulcerative colitis (CD), with common manifestations such as recurrent abdominal pain, diarrhea, and mucus and blood stools. Currently this disease cannot be cured and requires long-term medication and nutritional support to maintain relatively good physical condition; if serious complications such as intestinal obstruction and perforation occur they need to be treated by surgery. Due to the relatively late appearance of this disease and the variety of symptoms, many doctors do not have a thorough understanding of the disease, and most patients may have developed to moderate to severe disease at the time of diagnosis, making treatment very difficult. At the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Asian Inflammatory Bowel Disease Society (AOCC) held in Beijing recently, Prof. Hu Pinjin, a renowned gastroenterologist and former head of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Group of the Chinese Medical Association’s Digestive Diseases Branch and chief expert of the Department of Gastroenterology of the Sixth Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, pointed out that it is because inflammatory bowel disease is very complex that multidisciplinary joint treatment is needed to achieve good results.
Multidisciplinary joint diagnosis and treatment of IBD is on the way Inflammatory bowel disease, especially Crohn’s disease, is complex and variable, especially in China, and the symptoms are very similar to intestinal tuberculosis, leukoaraiosis (rare in Western countries), lymphoma, etc., so the difficulty of diagnosis is further increased, and many patients have been transferred to multiple departments, and often the disease has reached a moderate to severe stage before being diagnosed. Therefore, to diagnose IBD, we cannot rely only on gastroenterology colonoscopy, but also need the multidisciplinary collaboration of pathology, radiology, ultrasound, and immunology to identify the disease; it cannot be solved by medical medication alone, but also relies on surgical treatment; if the patient is a minor, the involvement of pediatrics is also crucial.
Hu Pinjin pointed out: “Inflammatory bowel disease multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment need to have a department as the main body, to Zhongshan Sixth Hospital, for example, the Department of Gastroenterology set up a special inflammatory bowel disease treatment team. If there are patients with suspected inflammatory bowel disease in other departments, they will be referred to the professional team of gastroenterology, and after this team receives the diagnosis, they will further contact the relevant departments to make a joint diagnosis; in terms of treatment, the inflammatory bowel disease team has very close cooperation with the gastroenterology and anal surgery – consultation and the time of surgery, pre-surgical preparation, post-operative follow-up, how to prevent recurrence, a series of issues. how to prevent recurrence, a whole range of issues, and patients are given detailed planning.” For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, the IBD Center of Zhongshan Sixth Hospital will also issue special consultation cards, with unlimited registration numbers, which can be registered at any time during the time of the special outpatient clinic; for patients who come from abroad and need to be hospitalized, priority will also be given to bed arrangements; if patients are discharged from the hospital with stable conditions, they can also receive guidance on medication and review on a special online platform, and can be contacted at any time for special situations. It can be said that multidisciplinary treatment greatly saves patients’ consultation cost and time, reduces the difficulty of confirming the diagnosis, and improves the efficiency of treatment.
Hu added that multidisciplinary treatment is especially suitable for patients treated with biological agents. Biological agents are effective in early inflammatory bowel disease, especially in children and young patients; once intestinal complications such as intestinal infection, abscess, obstruction and stricture occur, biological agents cannot be used, but will exacerbate the disease. Therefore, it is crucial for patients’ disease control to catch the treatment timing by early diagnosis with the multidisciplinary help of surgery, imaging department and pathology department.
With the gradual attention to the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease in China’s medical community, multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment centers for inflammatory bowel disease are being standardized and improved in central cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which will bring greater convenience to the majority of patients.