Evaluation of histologic features with potential prognostic value in ulcerative colitis

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are a complex, heterogeneous, idiopathic, inflammatory, chronic entity with common clinical, endoscopical and histological features including some well-defined diseases (UC and CD), but also a group of indeterminate colitis. Ulcerative colitis is the most frequent and prominent member of IBD. The current study is trying to evaluate the impact of various histologic features on UC's evolution and outcome--an issue that has generated considerable interest in the academical environment. We gathered a cohort of 20 consecutive patients with positive clinical, endoscopical, histologic and imagistic diagnosis of UC who were prospectively enrolled for close clinical, biochemical, endoscopic and histologic surveillance. Every patient underwent an ileo-colonoscopy and multiple biopsies were taken from inflamed and normal areas of the mucosa. All these procedures were repeated after a year (12 months) of follow-up. This study is presenting the correlation between Mayo score for assessment of ulcerative colitis activity and several histologic features: Geboes histologic score for ulcerative colitis, basal plasmacytosis and vascular lesions using Pearson correlation test. The most promising prognosis value has basal plasmacytosis, confirming previous studies. These data emphasize the need of a more complex, clinical, endoscopic and histologic system of semi-quantitative assessment of UC lesions in order to stratify patients according to their risk to relapse.