COMMENTARY

Inflammatory bowel disease

Crohn’s disease or Crohn’s diseases?

I D R Arnott, J Satsangi

Gastrointestinal Unit, University Department of Medical Sciences, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor J Satsangi, Gastrointestinal Unit, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU, UK;
J.Satsangi@ed.ac.uk

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Disease behaviour in Crohn’s disease is dynamic and not stable over time

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Keywords: Crohn’s disease; disease behaviour; fistula; stricture; smoking

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In their landmark paper of 1932, Crohn, Ginzburg, and Oppenheimer¹ described "a disease of the terminal ileum, affecting mainly young adults and characterised by a subacute or chronic necrotising and cicratrising inflammation. The ulceration of the mucosa is accompanied by a disproportionate connective tissue reaction . . . which frequently leads to stenosis of the lumen of the intestine, associated with the formation of multiple fistulas". In the intervening years however, the term Crohn’s disease has been introduced, and now covers a heterogeneous range of clinical presentations, including the classical phenotype of regional ileitis. A number of attempts have been made to subclassify patients with Crohn’s disease into subgroups with similar stable phenotypic characteristics. These attempts have been catalysed first by attempts to individualise therapy, and most recently by progress in understanding the molecular genetics of Crohn’s disease, and the need to relate genotype to disease phenotype. . . . [Full text of this article]

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