Iron Deficiency Anemia has negative impact on disease progression in IBD

A recent study revealed that a co-diagnosis of iron deficiency anemia in inflammatory bowel disease patients worsened the disease by increasing the progression in turn leading to increased admission to hospitals thus causing a burden on the health care system. The study was published in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Gastroenterology. 

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are a group of chronic inflammatory disorders of the gastrointestinal tract characterized by recurrent bouts of inflammation. A frequent extraintestinal symptom of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is iron deficiency anemia (IDA) affecting around one-third of patients. Literature has shown that the majority of patients with IBD patients have IDA which may sometimes go undiagnosed and undertreated leading to further complications. Hence researchers conducted a study to compare IBD progression and healthcare resource utilization in patients with and without a co-diagnosis of IDA in a real-world setting between January 2010 and September 2017. 

A retrospective comparative study was carried out on adult IBD patients diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and/or Crohn’s disease using Italian entities’ administrative databases, covering 9.3 million health-assisted individuals. Within 12 months from IBD diagnosis, IDA was identified by at least one prescription for iron and/or IDA hospitalization and/or blood transfusion (proxy of diagnosis). Based on the presence/absence of IDA, the IBD population was divided. Propensity score matching (PSM) was applied to wane off potential unbalances between the groups owing to the nonrandom patients’ allocation. Before and after PSM, IBD progression (in terms of IBD-related hospitalizations and surgeries), and healthcare resource costs were assessed.