A study led by Mayo Clinic has found that infliximab (Remicade) administered alone (monotherapy) or in combination with azathioprine is a more effective treatment for patients with moderate to severe Crohn's disease than azathioprine alone.
These findings were presented at the 2008 American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Annual Meeting.
Crohn's disease is an inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal tract that affects an estimated 500,000 people in the United States. Symptoms include abdominal pain, fever, nausea, vomiting, weight loss and diarrhea. Crohn's disease has no known medical cure. One common therapy used to manage the disease is a series of intravenous infusions of infliximab, which blocks tumor necrosis factor, an important cause of inflammation in Crohn's disease. Azathioprine is an orally-administered, small molecule immunosuppressive which has a broad immunosuppressive effect.
"Historically, patients with Crohn's disease have been treated sequentially with steroids, then azathioprine, then monoclonal antibodies such as infliximab. The study definitively demonstrates that infliximab-based strategies are more effective than azathioprine," says William Sandborn, M.D., the lead author and a gastroenterologist at Mayo Clinic. "Clinicians should consider a shift in practice to incorporate this new data."