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Klaudia Farkas, Ferenc Nagy, Zoltán Szepes, Tibor Nyári, Tibor Wittmann, Tamás Molnár, Risk factors for colectomy in ulcerative colitis patients with severe flare-up: Some of the few things comparable between the US and Central Europe, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Volume 17, Issue 2, 1 February 2011, Pages E11–E12, https://doi.org/10.1002/ibd.21350
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To the Editor:
We read with great interest the recently published article by Ananthakrishnan et al,1 who proposed a novel score to identify the subsequent colectomy risk in in-patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) using ICD-9-CM discharge primary and secondary diagnosis codes from all over the US. The number of patients was enormous, the statistics were accurate; only the accuracy of the diagnoses (461 patients had to be excluded from the analysis because both Crohn's disease and UC were registered) might be questionable. Hospitalization alone for the management of UC has previously been proven to be an independent predictor of colectomy by the same research group.2 Finding a simple and correct scoring system to identify the real candidates for surgery could help clinicians to indicate surgical intervention at the appropriate time to avoid the complications of prolonged medical treatment or late surgery. Another of the few studies (by Hefti et al3) addressing this topic pointed to the usefulness of the examination of the number of flare-ups, the frequency of hospitalization, or the number of courses of corticosteroids in UC patients who required colectomy.
