“It’s very rare for people to die of Crohn’s today,” says Ashwin Ananthakrishnan, MBBS, MPH, a gastroenterologist with the Massachusetts General Hospital Digestive Healthcare Center’s Crohn’s and Colitis Center in Boston. This is thanks to “better treatment, surgery, and use of medications,” he says. Indeed, although Crohn’s disease is a chronic condition — meaning ongoing and long term — research suggests that people with Crohn’s usually have the same life expectancy as people without the condition, according to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. Here is some advice on how you can stay as healthy as possible. More and more, physicians are treating Crohn’s disease with biologics and biosimilars, which are more targeted therapies that don’t affect your whole body like steroids do, the foundation says.
Preventing Complications of Crohn’s Disease
Managing your Crohn’s and preventing serious complications is possible if you take the right steps. This includes sticking to your treatment plan and making healthy lifestyle choices, such as quitting smoking. A study published in April 2020 in the journal Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics found that people with Crohn’s disease who quit smoking tended to live longer than those who continued to smoke. The people who are most at risk for serious complications are not only those who smoke but also those who are not getting proper treatment for inflammation, says Ananthakrishnan. “People with poorly controlled Crohn’s wind up with a lot of bowel damage and repeated, resistant, or undertreated inflammation,” he says. Letting your Crohn’s disease go untreated can also cause nutritional deficiencies, he says. Maintaining a healthy weight can also improve your overall health and help extend your life with Crohn’s disease, the study found. It’s also worth noting that people with inflammatory bowel disease can be three times more likely to develop deep vein thrombosis — a blood clot that forms in a vein, usually in the legs — or a pulmonary embolism — blockage in the lung arteries — especially when hospitalized, according to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. Always make sure your doctors are aware that you have Crohn’s; in some cases, you may receive a blood thinner to lower your risk of clotting. Another way to ward off serious complications is with preventive screenings, including a colonoscopy. People with Crohn’s have a higher risk of colorectal cancer than the general population, especially if they’ve had the disease for more than 8 years. A study published in June 2020 in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis found that those with Crohn’s disease were over 10 times more likely than other adults to develop colorectal cancer. Still, according to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, colorectal cancer is highly treatable if it’s caught early. The bottom line: It’s important to keep your Crohn’s in check by getting the recommended blood tests, MRIs, CT scans, and colonoscopies — even if you’re symptom free. “People are most concerned about how they feel,” says Ananthakrishnan, but even if you don’t have symptoms, you can have underlying inflammation that still needs to be treated.
