Impact of surgery on quality of life in Crohn's disease patients: Final results of Czech cohort

Abstract

Introduction: Crohn's disease (CD) belongs to chronic diseases that highly affect the patient's quality of life (QoL). The effect of the disease and impairment of QoL in CD patients is already known. The aim was to assess how surgical treatment influences the patients' QoL and determine factors that can affect postoperative QoL. Methods and patients: We compared the QoL before and after surgery in patients who had undergone a bowel resection at our department due to CD between 2010-2016. The patients filled in a standardized QLQ-CR29 questionnaire to assess QoL in the preoperative period and the postoperative period after a 2-month interval. The control groups were CD patients who had not undergone surgical treatment (bowel resection) and a healthy cohort. In the QoL evaluation, 132 patients with CD who had undergone surgery (bowel resection), 83 patients with CD without an operation and 104 healthy subjects were enrolled. Results: 104 of the operated patients experienced a postoperative improvement of the overall QoL (78.8 %), 2 patients did not register any changes in QoL (1.5 %) and 26 patients (19.7 %) experienced a worsening of their postoperative QoL. The results were statistically significant (p < 0.001). Conclusion: We detected a significant improvement of the overall QoL after surgical resection in CD patients (measured 2 months after surgery). Gender was identified as the only statistically relevant factor with influence on postoperative QoL.