THE INFLUENCE OF AGE AT DIAGNOSIS ON CLINICAL FEATURES IN ELDERLY PATIENTS WITH CROHN'S DISEASE

Inflammatory bowel diseases are chronic recurrent bowel disorders. They usually occur in children and young adults. It is an uncommon condition in the elderly. This work is aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics and disease course of Crohn Disease in the elderly patients and to compare them with the clinical characteristics of younger patients in a population from Western Algeria region. It was a retrospective comparative survey of 35 elderly patients whose age was>60 years diagnosed during the period from 2007 to 2020 at the level of general surgery departments and university hospital centers in the Western Algeria region. The study included 437 Crohn Disease patients involving 35 elderly and 402 young adults. The mean age of the elderly patients was 65.48±11.43. The most noted localization was colonic in Elderly with a rate of 23 (65.7%)/P= 0.002, while it was ileo-caecal in 236 Young patients (58.7%)/P= 0.005. The majority of elderly patients, complained of abdominal pain 28 (80%),
cessation of matter and gas 18 (51.4%), vomiting 13 (37.1%), weight loss 06 (17.1%), and diarrhea 05 (14.3%). During the follow-up period, medical therapy was the same for both groups. Moreover, 29 (82.8%) of the elderly patients underwent surgical treatment compared to 295 (73.4%) of the young patients. The number of patients with extra-intestinal manifestations in the elderly group was significantly higher than in the young group. Through our results, it seems that Crohn's disease in the elderly generally follows the same clinical pattern as in young people, with some exceptions.