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Dual Testing Strategy Linked to Long-Term Benefits in Crohn's Disease - Medscape
This study suggests using both faecal calprotectin and intestinal ultrasound together can better identify patients who reach deeper, transmural healing — and those patients had lower risk of bowel-damage progression. That could affect how monitoring is done in Crohn’s disease.
Clinicians managing Crohn’s disease, adult patients with Crohn’s disease interested in monitoring strategies, researchers studying biomarkers and imaging in IBD, and patients on maintenance therapy concerned about long-term bowel damage.
What To Know
This Medscape report summarizes a prospective single-centre observational study that compared faecal calprotectin (FC) plus intestinal ultrasound (IUS) results in people with Crohn’s disease and grouped patients by concordant/discordant test results.
The authors found that patients with "transmural healing" (normal FC <100 μg/g and normal IUS) had lower risk of bowel-damage progression and fewer relapse-related drug discontinuations than patients in the other groups. The study also reported poor agreement between the two tests and higher patient acceptability for IUS than for FC.
Study limitations and practical points: The study used a single sonographer, lacked central IUS reading, was single-centre with relatively short follow-up and small subgroup sizes, and did not routinely use central endoscopy or MRI outcomes for all participants.
These limitations mean findings are hypothesis-generating rather than definitive practice-changing evidence.
What this might mean for care: The report suggests combining biochemical (FC) and transmural (IUS) assessment could better identify patients with deeper healing who have lower risk of structural bowel progression, and that IUS is generally well accepted by patients.
Decisions about monitoring strategies should still rely on clinical judgment and available local resources, and further larger/longer studies would strengthen these findings. Source note: Article summarizes a study published in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (April 25, 2025) and was posted on Medscape.
Findings come from a single-centre observational study with one sonographer, limited follow-up, and small subgroup event counts. The study is useful for hypothesis generation and highlights the complementary roles of FC and IUS, but it does not on its own mandate changes to standard monitoring protocols.
