Nutritional status of patients with chronic inflammatory bowel diseases and methods of its assessment

Abstract

Chronic inflammatory bowel diseases, namely ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, still remain one of the most complicated and pressing challenges of gastroenterology and coloproctology. As chronic inflammatory bowel disease are very common and number of patients with this disease increases, the scientists all over the world have to study the clinical features and pathogenesis of systemic lesions in ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease more intensively in order to develop some new methods for the diagnosis and treatment of such patients. The problem is that physicians do not focus enough attention on detection of the nutritional status disorders in this ca­tegory of patients. One of the causes for such situation is that there is no common standard for assessing nutritional status and risk of its disorders, which reduces possibility of analysis, generalization of research results and development of algorithms to correct these disorders. This paper reflects the principal methods to diagnose the nutritional status disorders. The possibilities of instrumental and laboratory research methods are shown. The attention was paid to gastrointestinal microbiota, as it is well known that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and microflora disorders in large bowel play an important role and lead to the progression of malnutrition. The search was done using PubMed, Medline, Embase databases.

Keywords

• review
• chronic inflammatory bowel diseases
• ulce­rative colitis
• crohn’s disease
• nutritional status
• anthropometry
• questionnaire survey
• laboratory methods