Letter to the Editor on “Treatment Adherence and Clinical Outcomes of Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic”

Abstract

To the EditorsWe read with interest the article by Iborra et al.[1] describing the clinical outcomes and the fulfillment of the treatment schedule of patients with IBD treated with biological agents at their unit. They found that adherence to intravenous and subcutaneous biological therapies during the pandemic was high in a single-center cohort of patients with IBD even though the cumulative incidence of confirmed COVID-19 was low. But we have reached different conclusions via a questionnaire including the disease activity and treatment schedules of patients with IBD at our unit during the COVID-19 pandemic.A total of 239 patients (71 patients with CD, 151 patients with UC and 17 patients with unclassified IBD) participated in the questionnaire, including 108 (45.2%) women and 131 (54.8%) men (Table 1). Median age of patients with IBD was 41 years old. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 188 (78.7%) patients reported that their disease was in clinical remission period based on clinical symptoms, and 51 (21.3%) patients had fever, abdominal pain, diarrhea, hematochezia, vomiting, joint pain. Our results showed that the COVID-19 pandemic delayed IBD-related examinations and operations. And 128 (53.6%) patients reported that the examinations including biochemical tests, colonoscopy, abdominal CT were delayed. In addition, 13 (5.4%) patients delayed surgical treatment. In all, 43.8% of patients chose the Internet platform for medical consultation. Mobile communication such as Wechat accounted for 57.5% of online medical consultation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of our study showed that there were significant differences in Author's contribution Cong Dai wrote the paper. Cong Dai and Yuhong Huang had the original idea for the paper. All authors reviewed and approved the final draft of the paper.