Launching atomic IBD
Building deep community amongst clinicians, academics, industry and patients
I’ve been working in IBD since 2003 and seen many positive changes.
As a clinician and a scientist I get to see the urgent unmet needs amongst my patients and can work to the deliver some of the solutions. As a passionate educator and communicator I can hope to further translate new research findings into best clinical practice. I can help motivate patients and clinicians alike to improve standards and academic and industry partners to invest fully in IBD.
My core goal is simply to improve outcomes for people living with IBD.
During the pandemic I have worked to communicate key updates on COVID as they relate to people with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It has made me think about how best to communicate with our community and I’ve spent time learning the necessary tools.
Atomic IBD is my latest iteration on the journey to bring deep community to the global IBD network.
It stems from the atomic essays I’ve published this year - over 60 and mostly about IBD.
Today I wrote and published an atomic essay on the problems with anti-TNF drugs:
Revisiting the epidemiology of IBD through the Lothian IBD registry
Earlier this week I resisted the epidemiology of IBD and posted a video of Gareth Jones explaining how we generated the Lothian IBD Registry and what we found:
To accompany the video I put together a twitter thread that captures many of the key points about epidemiology of IBD in the Western world.
In particular the issue of compounding prevalence - whereby we have stable incidence rates but prevalence rates that increase year on year. This is because we mostly diagnose IBD in young people and without excess mortality the numbers compound. In fact the number of people with IBD dying each year is about 5-fold lower than the number of people we diagnose each year.
In Edinburgh (the Lothians) we have a population of approximately 900,000 people; we diagnose roughly one person with IBD each day of the year.
You can read the paper that Gareth published on the Lothian IBD Registry
Coming soon to atomic IBD
All the details of Edinburgh IBD 2022: Holistic Remission from Bench to Bedside - a full hybrid production with live at Edinburgh International Conference Centre on the 13th January
Updates and teachings on IBD for the whole community: clinicians, patients, academics, industry partners and other stake holders
Links to Twitter threads, atomic essays, YouTube videos and more
I’m doing this on my own to start with so posting will be sporadic - please bear with me.