Crohn’s disease vs. Intestinal tuberculosis: A challenging differential diagnosis

Abstract

Crohn’s disease (CD) is a chronic, granulomatous and idiopathic disease that can affect the entire digestive tract. In recent years its incidence has increased, but the therapeutic arsenal has also grown bigger and now includes immunosuppressants. On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers tuberculosis (TB) to be endemic in Colombia. CD and intestinal tuberculosis (ITB) are diseases that have clinical characteristics that are so similar that the endoscopic, imaging, and even histological findings may be indistinguishable in some patients. Immunosuppressed patients and patients with CD treated with immunomodulation have a higher risk of developing concomitant TB infections. For this reason, we decided to review the literature to characterize the state of the art for both pathologies and to provide data that will allow clinicians to differentiate between them. We used the PUBMED, Scielo, Google Scholar databases to obtain information published in English and Spanish.