Patients of uveitis more likely to develop IBD, finds study

According to a recent study, patient with uveitis have a much higher chance of acquiring inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than those who do not have uveitis.

Uveitis is an inflammation of the eye's uveal tract. Anatomic locations of involvement are used to classify subtypes, which include anterior (iris and ciliary body), posterior (choroid and retina), intermediate (pars plana), and pan uveitis (generalized inflammation). IBD includes Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis, which are chronic idiopathic autoimmune enteropathies (UC).

The following study was done by Tzu-Chen Lo and his team and they focused their work on to look at the possibility of a link between uveitis and an increased risk of developing IBD. The following study and its data were published in Nature Journal on 21 June, 2021.

This was a retrospective cohort research that looked at data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database between January 1, 2001 and December 31, 2013 to find uveitis patients and age- and gender-matched controls. The two groups' cumulative incidence rates of future IBD were compared. A multivariate cox regression model was used to calculate the adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of IBD linked to uveitis after adjusting for hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and smoking. In addition, the HRs for Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) IBD subtypes were computed individually.

This study highlighted some of the poorly understood facts and put forward some new findings as well. Some of the major findings include: the uveitis group had a substantially greater cumulative incidence of IBD compared to age- and gender-matched controls in this 13-year population-based research utilizing the Taiwan NHIRD. When CD and UC outcomes were examined individually, uveitis was shown to be substantially related with incident CD but not with UC. In both the univariate and multivariate Cox regression models, there was a substantially higher chance of developing IBD in the uveitis group. This study also discovered that hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and smoking were all substantially linked with IBD.

In conclusion, this study discovered a link between uveitis and a higher incidence of incident IBD. Further research found a link between uveitis and CD, but not between uveitis and UC. In the clinical setting, ophthalmologists should be aware of the potential risk of IBD in uveitis patients; advise uveitis patients' primary care physicians to screen for IBD during periodic targeted medical histories, symptom inventories, and physical exams; and recommend gastroenterology referrals, especially for patients with gastrointestinal symptoms.

Reference:

Lo, T.-C., Chen, Y.-Y., & Chen, H.-H. (2021). Risk of inflammatory bowel disease in uveitis patients: a population-based cohort study. Eye. doi:10.1038/s41433-021-01645-4