Australian Crohn’s disease patients live about as long as the general population, avoiding the 1.5 fold increased mortality found among their counterparts in other countries, according to data presented at ECCO Congress in Barcelona this week.
It is a good news-story for Australia’s universal healthcare system and shows the focus should now be on quality of life and avoiding drug side-effects, the investigators told Gastroenterology Update.
Based on a cohort of more than 800 patients with IBD in Sydney followed-up for a median of more than 20 years, the study found among those that had died (25.8% of the whole cohort) the cause of death was ‘possibly related’ to the patient’s IBD in about a quarter of cases.
Nevertheless, they found no increased...
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