IBD Linked to Higher Risk for Interstitial Lung Disease

TOPLINE:

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) had a significantly higher risk for developing interstitial lung disease (ILD) compared with the general population and siblings who do not have the condition.

METHODOLOGY:

Although pulmonary complications of IBD have been recognized for over a decade, they remain largely unstudied.

Researchers conducted a population-based cohort study in Sweden between 1969 and 2019 to assess the long-term risk for ILD in 85,705 patients diagnosed with IBD (median age, 41 years; 48% women).

They matched these patients to 412,677 control individuals from the general population (median age, 41 years; 48% women) and to 101,278 IBD-free siblings of the patients (median age, 39 years; 49% women).

The primary outcome was incident ILD, a broad gro