Publications in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases in the Archives of Gastroenterology

Abstract

A brief historical analysis of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) allows us to visualize a new scenario, either in incidence and prevalence, combined with new concepts, new strategies and consequently new challenges, which are more defying in children and adolescents in terms of diagnosis and treatment. As we know, IBD still has no cure and its treatment and control will be permanent, associated with that there is the real necessity for surgical treatment, whether it is due to complications, such as failure of clinical treatment or due to the more aggressive course of the pediatric disease. Likewise, delayed puberty and compromised growth have definite and devastating impacts on this population.We have observed an increase in the number of publications with international and national data about the epidemiology of IBD. In a deeper and more detailed reading, we observe that in the international scenario, especially in developed countries, there is a certain trend towards the stabilization of its incidence (1) . In developing countries, such as Brazil, there is an increase in incidence and prevalence in young adults, adolescents and children; when comparing the two diseases, ulcerative colitis (UC) seems to be more common in preschool children, while CD is more prevalent in older children (1) .The largest epidemiological study ever carried out on national data, in which more than 210,000 patients were analyzed, revealed an increase in the prevalence of both IBD, but the increase in incidence was only observed in UC, and in the same way there was a predominance of UC when compared to Crohn's disease (CD) (2) . These data differ from other national studies, in which there is a predominance of CD in relation to UC, as in one of the articles in this issue (3) , which was carried out in a reference center for IBD in the city of Campinas (São Paulo). The authors emphasize that the increase in incidence and prevalence rates is more evident in recently industrialized countries, specifically in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. They observed that the patients were young, with no gender predominance, and that there was a higher frequency of patients with CD (66.6%). Most of them (85.4%) were