What Should a Newly Diagnosed UC Patient Know?

Getting diagnosed with ulcerative colitis is the first step toward feeling better, but then what? A Cleveland Clinic gastroenterologist lays out the important conversations you should have with your doctor and what treatments options are available to help you manage this disease.

That initial visit, when you meet with the patients is really critical. You really need to take the time to understand their full disease history, how it’s impacting their life, all the other factors in their life that may impact the choices they make in terms of treatments or surgeries. So I really try to spend a lot of time that first visit to get to know the patient, know what’s going on in their life. In addition to what’s going on with their specific disease in terms of deciding on the treatments that we may decide to pursue.

那么药物选择真的取决于何鸿燊w we classify the patient. So for mild patients with ulcerative colitis, generally, the first approach would be using five amino salicylate medications. People may recognize these as mesalamines, and these can be given in an oral formulation or a topical formulation, meaning that they can administer it via the rectum as an enema or a suppository. And the advantage of these medications, which have been around for a long time, is that they can be very effective for treatment of mild disease, and they also have very few side effects. They’re non-immune suppressing, they work by direct contact on the inflamed surface area. So I think for mild disease, that’s still the the first line approach for patients.

For patients with more moderate to severe disease, we’ve learned more in recent years that the key in both ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease is to treat the inflammation effectively very early in the disease course to prevent the downstream complications. So in UC, trying to prevent the need for surgery later on, prevent chronic bowel damage from that can happen from chronic inflammation, limiting risk of development of colon cancer later on by controlling inflammation. So we move much more towards the use of our more effective immunosuppressive therapies so patients may recognize these as biologic drugs or now the newer agents, which are small molecules.

Now we have many more drugs and classes of drugs available to patients, so I think the future is really bright in terms of the therapeutic options. We’re just going to have to now understand what we use, when and and how and even combine different drugs, potentially in the future.