Grant: Operating Grant

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, results in cycles of bowel inflammation, pain, diarrhea, and bleeding. There are nearly one quarter million Canadians with these diseases, which affect people of all ages, but are especially common in young people. IBD can impact all aspects of daily life, including work, relationships, energy and psychological health. Our Centre has become an international leader for studying outcomes in persons with IBD, with a view to improving disease management and quality of life. The Manitoba IBD Cohort Study started in 2002. Participants have provided information to the study team every six months for almost ten years, through annual interview, blood samples, and mailed surveys. We have recently initiated an Inception Cohort Study to follow persons with recently diagnosed disease. We have extensive knowledge about the disease course and psychological profiles from participants in these cohorts. We will enroll participants from these cohorts into new substudies with the aim to help researchers understand the disease course, disease management issues,quality of life issues and coping approaches from the patient perspective. In one substudy we will carry out in depth interviews with participants to understand their experiences of coping with this challenging health problem over more than ten years. In a second substudy we will track patients every 2 weeks for 1 year through computer based surveys so that we can understand their symptom experience prospectively and understand what patients view as a flare of disease. We will correlate their self-reported flares with a stool test that can measure a marker of active intestinal inflammation. The information from these studies and from other substudies of the Manitoba IBD Cohort Study will be used, in turn, to develop patient and family-centred education materials to support people in self-management of this chronic health condition