Time to Symptom Resolution in Ulcerative Colitis With Multimatrix Mesalazine Treatment: A Pooled Analysis

Management and treatment optimization of patients with mild to moderate ulcerative colitis

INTRODUCTION

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease with a significant health-care burden worldwide. While medical therapy aims to induce and maintain remission, optimal management of mild to moderate UC remains challenging due to heterogeneity in severity classifications and non-standardized approaches. This comprehensive review summarizes current evidence and knowledge gaps to optimize clinical decision-making in patients with mild to moderate UC.

AREAS COVERED

After an extensive literature search of PubMed, Medline, and Embase through August 2023, we provide an overview of definitions utilized to characterize mild to moderate UC severity and established therapeutic targets. Current medical treatments including mesalazine formulations, corticosteroids, and their combinations are surveyed. The role of emerging intestinal ultrasound, telemedicine, and home testing is explored. Individualized, patient-centered paradigms aiming to streamline care delivery through proactive identification of relapses are also examined.

EXPERT OPINION

Addressing inconsistencies in disease activity stratification will better align tailored regimens with each patient's profile. Advancing noninvasive technologies like ultrasound criteria and home testing could improve UC management by enabling personalized models. Realizing individualized plans through informed shared-decision making between health-care providers and fully engaged patients holds promise to maximize quality of life outcomes. Continuous improvement relies on innovation bridging different domains to overcome current limitations and push the field toward more predictive and tailored care.

Treatment of Patients with Mild to Moderate Ulcerative Colitis: A Middle East Expert Consensus

The prevalence of ulcerative colitis (UC) in the Middle East is increasing, impacting the economic and healthcare burden. The management of patients with mild to moderate UC is still a challenge as several factors can affect optimal care, including drug choice, induction and maintenance dose, treatment optimization and de-escalation, therapy duration, monitoring, and safety profile. We conducted an expert consensus to standardize the management of patients with mild to moderate UC. Sixteen experts in inflammatory bowel diseases, through a well-established and accepted Delphi methodology, voted and approved eight statements in order to provide practical guidance to clinicians in the Middle East.

Endoscopy for assessment of mucosal healing in ulcerative colitis: time bound or response guided?

The timing of colonoscopy in patients with active ulcerative colitis (UC) lacks coherence. The published guidelines and recommendations advocate time-bound colonoscopy in patients with active UC to assess for mucosal healing. However, the practice of performing colonoscopies at fixed time frames lacks reasoning. The time to achieve mucosal healing in UC is not uniform across the patient populations and is influenced by the disease severity and efficacy and time to therapeutic response of the drugs being used. Additionally, with the availability of sensitive noninvasive inflammatory biomarkers such as fecal calprotectin, that parallel the disease activity and correlate with mucosal healing, the notion of performing colonoscopy at fixed intervals sounds unjustifiable. The authors express their view that a response-guided colonoscopy (driven by normalization of clinical symptoms and inflammatory biomarkers), rather than a time-bound colonoscopy, would be more logical, apart from being cost-effective and patient-friendly.