AIBD Poster Award Winner: Ece Unal, MD
Cleveland Clinic surgery resident Ece Unal, MD, gives an overview of her award-winning poster on a systematic review of excision of skin tags in perianal Crohn’s Disease, presented at the AIBD Annual Meeting.
Ece Unal, MD, is a general surgery resident at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, my name is Ece Unal. I'm a general surgery resident and clinical research fellow at the Cleveland Clinic. I work specifically with the colorectal surgery department focusing on IBD surgery and outcomes of IBD surgery. I'm here at AIBD 2025 today, and my project got the best surgical abstract award, and it was titled Excision of Skin Tags and Perianal Crohn's Disease, a Systematic Review.
For these patients, way back in 1975, there was a landmark study that found that there was a significantly high risk of complications and nonhealing afterhemorrhoid or skin tag excision. Since then, in the past 50 years, however, we've seen a remarkable amount of changes in both the medical and surgical care of Crohn's patients, and we wanted to examine the literature and our own data to see if those facts still stand in the 21st century.
We looked across the literature and identified 12 studies that looked at skin tag or limited hemorrhoidal excision of any kind. And then including our own institutional data, we did a meta-analysis to look at rates of wound healing across these patients.
We found that in the 10 studies that reported on wound healing, an overall pooled healing rate of 97%, which is significantly better than what we were seeing 50 years ago. And across the literature that a lot of centers were reporting near complete wound healing rates for these patients.
The reason why we wanted to focus on this is that a lot of Crohn's patients are basically denied care for surgical care of skin tags because of studies from the past. And what we want to offer is a modern look at the literature saying for patients with lifestyle-limiting skin tags and disease that they don't think can be overcome with just medical management, that surgical excision can be a safe and usable option in select patients.
I'd like to thank my mentor, Dr. Stefan Holubar, for helping foster an environment of excellent research, care, and education, and for mentoring me with this project, and all of Cleveland Clinic colorectal surgery, and most importantly AIBD 2025 for being an excellent educational and interactive IBD conference.
