According to a new study, those with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are more likely to have a stroke than those without the disease.
IBD vs IBS
IBD – Inflammatory bowel disease causes chronic inflammation of the intestines, it includes Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and unclassified inflammatory bowel disease.
IBS – Irritable bowel syndrome is a chronic syndrome made up of a group of symptoms, such as stomach pains/cramps, diarrhoea and constipation.
The study
This study was carried out by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
Results from this research showed that those with IBD were 13 per cent more likely ti have a stroke up to 25 years after their diagnosis than those without IBD.
Study author, Jiangwei Sun, says: “These results show that people with inflammatory bowel disease and their doctors should be aware of this long-term increased risk.
“Screening and management of stroke risk factors may be more urgent in people with IBD.”
The study included 85,006 individuals with IBD confirmed with a biopsy. They were then each matched with up to five individuals of the same birth year, sex and county of residence who did not have IBD, for a total of 406,987 participants.
During an average follow-up period of 12 years, 3,720 of the individuals with IBD had a stroke, compared with 15,599 of the individuals who did not have IBD, which is equivalent to a rate of 32.6 per 10,000 individual years for those with IBD compared to 27.7 for those without IBD.
Individual-years represent both the number of individuals in the study and the amount of time each person spends in the study.
When other stroke risk factors were accounted for by the researchers, they found that those with IBD were 13 per cent more likely to have a stroke than those without IBD. The researchers also found that the increased risk was mainly due to ischaemic stroke rather than haemorrhagic stroke.
Furthermore, as both IBD and stroke have some genetic components predisposing individuals to the disease, the researchers also included in this study full siblings of those with IBD.
The 101,082 siblings had no history of IBD or stroke at the beginning of the study. Staying consistent with the main findings, those with IBD had a higher risk of stroke than their siblings without IBD, with their overall risk being 11 per cent higher.
Sun, says: ““The elevated risk for people with IBD remained even 25 years after they were first diagnosed, corresponding to one additional stroke case for every 93 people with IBD until that point.”
