The Role of Active Inflammation and Surgical Therapy in Crohn's Disease Recurrence

An altered balance between effector and regulatory factors is supposed to sustain the tissue-damaging immune response in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Several studies demonstrate that severe active inflammation is a strong predictor for surgical complications and recurrence. Indeed, bowel resection in Crohn's disease (CD) patients has a high surgical recurrence rate. In this review, we examined the IBD inflammatory pathways, the current surgical treatments, and the almost inevitable recurrence. The question that might arise is if the cure of intestinal CD is to be found in the surgical approach. A selective search of two databases (PubMed and the Cochrane Library) has been carried out without considering a specific time horizon as inclusion criteria. The scope of this literature review was investigating on the role of inflammation in the management of CD. The following key words have been used to develop the query string: (i) inflammation; (ii) Crohn's disease; (iii) surgery; and (iv) postsurgical recurrence.