Dubinsky Marla
Pediatric IBD Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA.
Dig Dis. 2009;27(3):259-68. doi: 10.1159/000228559. Epub 2009 Sep 24.
Physicians rely heavily on the presence of disease markers to support or even at times modify their clinical impression for certain diseases that can only be diagnosed clinically. Typically these markers play an important role in helping to establish a diagnosis and to evaluate the activity of a chronic disease over time. The diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), however, is not based solely on clinical grounds. Invasive endoscopic and radiological as well as histopathological criteria need to be met in order to make a correct diagnosis and differentiate disease subtypes. The search for novel diagnostic approaches that accurately distinguishes a group of patients with IBD from those unaffected by the disease has become a focus in IBD research. This search, however, has taken a very exciting turn in the direction of finding biologic and genetic markers that can assess the natural history and predict the course of individual's disease including response to treatments over time.
医生在很大程度上依赖疾病标志物的存在来支持甚至有时修正他们对某些只能通过临床诊断的疾病的临床印象。通常，这些标志物在帮助建立诊断以及评估慢性病随时间的活动情况方面发挥着重要作用。然而，炎症性肠病（IBD）的诊断并非仅基于临床依据。为了做出正确诊断并区分疾病亚型，需要满足侵入性内镜检查、放射学以及组织病理学标准。寻找能够准确区分一组IBD患者与未受该病影响者的新型诊断方法已成为IBD研究的一个重点。然而，这一探索在寻找能够评估自然病史并预测个体疾病进程（包括随时间对治疗的反应）的生物和基因标志物方面出现了非常令人兴奋的转变。
