Patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) do not appear to have increased risk of side effects from the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, according to a recent Cedars-Sinai study published online and upcoming in print in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.
Los Angeles (June 8, 2021)
IBDs, including Crohn s disease and ulcerative colitis, are chronic conditions that occur when the intestinal immune system becomes overreactive, causing chronic diarrhea and other digestive symptoms. In a published survey at the beginning of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, 70% of IBD patients reported concern about side effects from the vaccines. What we ve learned is that if you have IBD, the side effects you re likely to experience after a vaccine are no different than they would be for anyone else, said Gil Melmed, MD, corresponding author of the study and director of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Research at Cedars-Sinai. If you re being treated with advanced therapies such as biologics, these side effects might even be milder. So, don t let that be a reason that you re not getting vaccinated.
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In African Americans, the genetic risk landscape for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is very different from that of people with European ancestry, according to results of the first whole-genome study of IBD in African Americans. The authors say that future clinical research on IBD needs to take ancestry into account.
Findings of the multi-center study, which analyzed the whole genomes of more than 1,700 affected individuals with Crohn s disease and ulcerative colitis and more than 1,600 controls, were published on February 17 in the
American Journal of Human Genetics.
As part of their analysis, the researchers developed an algorithm that corrects for ancestry when calculating an IBD polygenic risk score. Polygenic risk scores are tools for calculating gene-based risk for a disease, which are used for IBD as well as other complex conditions such as coronary artery disease.