Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) involves chronic inflammation of all or part of your digestive tract. IBD primarily includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.Severe diarrhea, pain, fatigue and weight loss. IBD can be debilitating and sometimes leads to life-threatening complications.
Doctors use one of two approaches to treatment: "step-up," which starts with milder drugs first, versus "top-down," which gives people stronger drugs earlier in the treatment process.

16,550 IBD cases with 1047 deaths and 82,917 controls with 3758 deaths occured. The mortality rate was 17.1 per 1000 person-years overall for IBD cases and 12.3 for controls; this difference was greatest in the elderly. Conversion of these figures to hazard ratios by Cox regression gave hazard ratios of 1.54 (1.44-1.65) for all IBD, 1.44 (1.31-1.58) for ulcerative colitis (UC), and 1.73 (1.54-1.96) for Crohn's disease.

In a population-based retrospective cohort study of 136,178 individuals with asthma and 143,904 individuals with COPD, Brassard and colleagues found a significantly increased incidence of IBD. Compared with the general population, the incidence of CD in asthma and COPD patients was 27% and 55% higher, and the incidence of UC was 30% higher among those with COPD.