Dee Dee Branchaud is in remission, yet she has suffered chronic abdominal pain for years. While invisible to medical tools, the pain has been so intense that she had to stop working at a job she loved. Her experiences, shared in her keynote speech at last year’s Pain in IBD: From Biological Mechanis...

Most physicians view pain the way firefighters view smoke, as an urgent alarm that signals an underlying problem. Find and treat the underlying problem and the pain should go away. (That’s why there’s an understandable caution in medicine about anything that might mask pain and make it harder t...

I was 22 years old when I was first diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). I felt very isolated as a young South Asian American woman, unable to relate to those around me who were healthy and able-bodied. Even though this disease runs in my family, there was very little knowledge about Cro...

On November 17-18, 2020, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation hosted its third annual IBD Innovate: Product Development for Crohn’s & Colitis™ conference. This meeting brings together researchers, start-up companies, industry companies, accelerator organizations and more who are commit...

Have you ever noticed that when you get a good night’s sleep, you feel better physically and emotionally? That is because there is a connection between your sleep and intestinal inflammation. Unfortunately, not every IBD patient gets good sleep. Research estimates that over 75% of IBD patients with ...

Did you know that perianal Crohn’s disease is both commonly diagnosed and a marker of more severe disease? Research estimates the incidence of perianal Crohn’s ranges from 17-43% of Crohn’s cases. For many of these patients, perianal disease comes with a host of complications, including fistulas – a...

Noah was only 1.5 years old when he first began exhibiting symptoms of IBD. His original doctor brushed it off as acid reflux. By the age of 2, Noah was hospitalized as failure to thrive. A new set of doctors began to track his symptoms and use pill cam endoscopy to track an area of concern. He cont...

When Christopher Columbus first sighted land in October 1492, he thought he had reached Japan. That’s how bad his map was.  In medicine, we rely increasingly on biomarkers (indicators of disease) to ”map” our health, disease risks, disease conditions, and responses to treatment. Some biomark...

Casey Jean Silvernale was diagnosed at age 11 with Crohn’s disease. Now, more than a dozen years later, she’s working as a clinical research coordinator in the Center for Neurointestinal Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and studying for her MCATS (the admissions test for medical schools). Ca...

Although the main purpose of IBD Innovate 2019 was to showcase new IBD products, the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation also wanted to make sure researchers and developers were up-to-date about current developments in data exchange research platforms. Having data exchange platforms openly available to...