You are here

  • Home
  • Online First
  • Sex-based differences in prescribed medications, surgical procedures and disease-related complications in IBD

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Sex-based differences in prescribed medications, surgical procedures and disease-related complications in IBD
  1. Celine Cumming1,
  2. Emad Mansoor2,3,
  3. Jaime Abraham Perez4,
  4. Davide Pietropaoli5,
  5. Rita Del Pinto1,5,
  6. Theresa T Pizarro1
  1. 1Department of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
  2. 2Department of Medicine/Division of Gastrointestinal & Liver Disease, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
  3. 3Digestive Health Institute, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, USA
  4. 4Clinical Research Center, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, USA
  5. 5Department of Clinical Medicine Public Health Life Sciences and Environment, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy
  1. Correspondence to Dr Theresa T Pizarro, Department of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, USA; theresa.pizarro{at}case.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2024-332318

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Danese et al1 emphasise the urgency to implement advanced combination treatments (ACTs) for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), suggesting that ACTs may be particularly effective in certain patient populations. In this context, sex as a biological variable is paramount to consider, but remains understudied in all aspects of research reporting and analyses (referred to as ‘sex-aware’ analyses2), and represents an essential element when evaluating disease prevention, intervention(s) and precision medicine. This is especially applicable to IBD since increasing evidence supports sex-based differences, including response to treatment(s), between male and female patients living with Crohn’s disease (CD) or ulcerative colitis (UC),3 4 yet specific studies to date are sparse.

    To this end, we sought to determine the current state of sex disparities in prescribed medications, surgical interventions and disease-related complications in IBD. Using the TriNetX platform, which allows real-time access to deidentified electronic health records of over 116 million patients, we performed a retrospective, sex-aware cohort study on 2 July 2024, implementing a previously described approach5 (validated with a positive predictive value of ≥92%).6 We identified over 359 426 patients having an index event of at least two instances of the same CD/UC diagnosis, with an added ≥2 instances of drug/therapy when considering outcomes. These patient groups were divided by sex and the resulting …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • RDP and TTP are joint senior authors.

    • X @ttpizarro, @PizarroLab

    • Contributors Study conception and design: CC, RDP and TTP. Acquisition of data: CC and JAP. Analysis and interpretation: CC, EM, JAP, DP and RDP. Drafting of manuscript: CC, RDP and TTP. Critical revision: EM, JAP, DP, RDP and TTP. Study supervision: EM, RDP and TTP.

    • Funding This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office on Women’s Health (ORWH)/ National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK): Administrative supplement for Research on Sex/Gender Differences (DK042191-S1) and from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation: Clinical Research Investigator-Initiated Award (CRIA) Senior Research Award (SRA-882725), both to TTP and RDP. CC was supported by CWRU’s Medical Student Summer Research Program (MSSRP) through an institutional training grant, T35 DK111373, from the NIH / NIDDK.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.