Tumour necrosis factor alpha and interleukin 1beta in relapse of Crohn's disease

Non-drug treatment of inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an idiopathic, chronic, nonspecific inflammatory disease. IBD is comprised of two major types, ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD), and is hard to be cured. Currently, aminosalicylic acid preparations, corticosteroids and immunosuppressant drugs are the main treatments for the disease, but there exists poor drug efficacy in some cases, and patients are prone to side effects. Biological agents greatly improve the efficacy, but for a small number of refractory patients, comprehensive intervention containing non-drug treatments is needed. Non-drug treatments like fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), stem cell transplantation, and granulocyte and monocyte apheresis (GMA) have shown enormous potential for the treatment of IBD, and have become a hot spot of IBD treatment research in recent years. In this paper, we review the non-drug treatments for IBD, in order to broaden the horizons of clinicians in the treatment of IBD.