AIBD Poster Award Winner: Wei Wei Lee, MD

Dr Lee describes her award-winning poster presentation at the Advances in IBD annual meeting on the frequency of changes in diagnosis from ulcerative colitis to Crohn's disease among pediatric patients.

Wei Wei Lee, MD, is a pediatric gastroenterologist affiliated with University Hospital-University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, my name is Wei Wei Lee. I'm a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of Michigan. Our research project looked at children diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at the University of Michigan over the past 10 years or so. And we wanted to look at what proportion of those patients ended up having a change of diagnosis to Crohn's disease.

We found that almost 10% of patients had that change in diagnosis, and the folks who had more severe disease at presentation were more likely to have that change in diagnosis. So, for example, the patients who had a colectomy done, almost 25% of them had a change in diagnosis. So that need for colectomy ended up with a 6-fold increased risk of diagnosis change.

Another example is patients who needed biologic therapy, and that was associated with a 15-fold increased risk of change in diagnosis. And finally, the patients who had low albumin at the time of diagnosis, for every point decrease in albumin, that was associated with more than double the risk of having a change of diagnosis to Crohn's disease.

We also wanted to take a look at patients who did not have a colectomy done at any point of their clinical course because there's already been some literature out there about patients who had a colectomy done and change in diagnosis to Crohn's disease. So in the patients who didn't have a colectomy done, we found that those who had gastroduodenal lesions at the time of diagnosis had a 9 times higher risk of change in diagnosis.

 To sum it all up, our study found that a change of diagnosis from ulcerative colitis to Crohn's disease in pediatric patients occurred in almost 10% of patients, which is not an insignificant proportion. Those who had more severe disease at the time of presentation, as well as those who had gastroduodenal lesions at the time of diagnosis, were at higher risk.

And finally, perhaps most importantly, we should be telling our patients about this. We should keep in mind these statistics and numbers when counseling our patients about their diagnoses as well as their prognoses.

 I'd like to thank Jeremy Adler, Aaron McDonnell, and Tom LaRue for all of their help with this project. I'd also like to thank AIBD for the opportunity to present our work, and we're really honored to have our work recognized here.