DATE: January 25, 2018
TIME: 07:00am PST, 10:00am EST, 4:00pm CET

Patients presenting with persistent abdominal pain and diarrhea are common in clinical practice. Evaluation of these patients, assuming no alarm symptoms, can be difficult.  Inflammatory bowel disease is always a possibility and while few will actually have IBD, the symptoms of IBS and IBD can overlap.   Concern with a missed diagnosis of IBD leads many clinicians to request endoscopic evaluation. The strategy of testing for fecal calprotectin, a calcium and zinc binding protein complex found in neutrophil cytosolic protein, utilizes non-invasive diagnostic testing to stratify patients in need of endoscopic confirmation, reducing costs and improving the overall patient healthcare experience.  Additionally, studies have shown that fecal calprotectin testing is an effective tool for disease management to ascertain therapy response and predict IBD relapse.  Decreasing fecal calprotectin levels correlate well to drug effectiveness, while increasing levels can predict relapse even before the patient experiences clinical symptoms.  For all these reasons fecal calprotectin is an important biomarker for IBD diagnosis and disease management.

Learning Objectives:

• Utility of fecal calprotectin testing in diagnosis and IBD management. 
• Correlating calprotectin cutoff levels with disease remission and predicting relapse.
• Optimal frequency of measuring calprotectin; single vs repeat measures.