“This tool has the potential to identify which patients are more likely benefit from alternate treatments, such as antibiotics, surgery, or emerging stem cell therapies,” said Dr. Jeffrey McCurdy.A team led by Dr. Jeffrey McCurdy has developed a personalized tool to predict whether anti-TNF medications are likely to heal a perianal fistula caused by Crohn’s disease.
These painful sores form a tunnel from the intestine to the skin around the anus. About one in three people with Crohn’s develop perianal fistulas.
Anti-TNF medications are a common treatment, but they don’t work for everyone and it can take months to find that out. To develop a more personalized approach, the research team looked at health records from 221 people given anti-TNF therapy for Crohn’s perianal fistulas.
They found factors like smoking, older age, and fistula length, branching and number of openings were linked with anti-TNF treatment not working after six months. The model they developed using these factors was published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and performs better than existing tools. Once validated, it could help guide patient care and clinical trial design.
“This tool has the potential to identify which patients are more likely benefit from alternate treatments, such as antibiotics, surgery, or emerging stem cell therapies,” said Dr. Jeffrey McCurdy, gastroenterologist and clinician investigator at The Ottawa Hospital and assistant professor at the University of Ottawa.
Funding: Canadian IBD Research Consortium
Cores: Ottawa Methods Centre
Authors: Jeffrey D. McCurdy, Javeria Munir, Simon Parlow, Jacqueline Reid, Russell Yanofsky, Talal Alenezi, Joseph Meserve, Brenda Becker, Zubin Lahijanian, Anas Hussam Eddin, Ranjeeta Mallick, Tim Ramsay, Greg Rosenfeld, Ali Bessissow, Talat Bessissow, Vipul Jairath, Siddharth Singh, David H. Bruining, Blair Macdonald, the Canadian IBD Research Consortium
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