Similar clinical characteristics of familial and sporadic inflammatory bowel disease in South Korea

Abstract

To investigate differences of clinical characteristics and disease courses between familial and sporadic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients. We obtained clinical data on Crohn's disease (CD) (n = 691) and ulcerative colitis (n = 1113) from a tertiary referral medical center between 2005 and 2012. Seventeen patients (2.5%) with CD and 27 patients (2.4%) with ulcerative colitis (UC) were identified as having a familial history of IBD, including the first and second degree relatives. For each control case, three times the number of age-, sex-, and diagnosis year-matched CD and UC patients, without a family history of IBD, were randomly selected in this case control study. There were no significant differences in age or main symptom at diagnosis, extraintestinal manifestation, location/extent, behavior of disease activity, number of hospitalizations, number of operations, operation type, number of relapses, or oral medical treatment between familial and sporadic CD and UC patients. Median (min-max) follow-up periods after diagnosis of familial CD and sporadic CD patients were 84 (24-312) and 36 (8-240) mo, respectively (P = 0.008). Familial CD patients more frequently used anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) antibodies compared to sporadic CD patients (17.6% vs 0%, P = 0.014). In conclusion, a family history of IBD does not seem to be an important predictive factor affecting clinical characteristics or disease course even if there is a more frequent use of anti-TNF antibodies in familial CD patients compared to sporadic CD patients.