Relationships between blood chemistry and histology of the rectal mucosa in Crohn's disease.

In the scope of the ECCDS, established to test the efficacy of prednisolone and/or sulfasalazine in Crohn's disease, the relationships of blood chemistry and CDAI to histology of rectal mucosa were studied in 115 patients by means of univariate and multivariate statistical analyses. Laboratory and histologic markers of inflammation tend to be correlated. But these correlations are definitively weak. Thus, the predictive value of histology for blood chemistry or CDAI is very low. Laboratory indices and CDAI are relatively inaccurate means of assessing disease severity at tissue level and vice versa.