Intestinal Ultrasound for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)
If your child has Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, you know how frustrating it is when your symptoms flare up despite your best efforts. Assessing their symptoms can often involve invasive testing, however, a novel, non-invasive technology called intestinal ultrasound can help you better understand your child’s symptoms and assess for inflammation. Intestinal ultrasound provides results in real time at your clinic visit so you and your child’s doctor can act of symptoms quickly and prevent further progression.
Call 702-6169 to Schedule an Appointment
What is Intestinal Ultrasound?
Intestinal ultrasound offers highly accurate images of your child’s bowel — without any special preparation required. This will help you and your doctor understand if your Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are active and make immediate changes to treatment if needed.
Considered the future of IBD monitoring, intestinal ultrasound is already a routine component of practice in other areas of the world including Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan. The University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s is one of only 3 Pediatric centers in the country — and the only one in the Midwest — to offer this safe and convenient tool for monitoring pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
How Can Intestinal Ultrasound Help Pediatric Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease?
Intestinal ultrasound performed by a trained pediatric IBD provider can transform care and disease management for kids of all ages who have IBD.
When your child comes to Comer Children’s, they may have an intestinal ultrasound as part of their assessment during initial and follow-up visits. It can be used to:
- Monitor disease activity: Intestinal ultrasound can assess how active your child’s disease is and check for complications like bowel strictures, fistulas or abscesses.
- Assess their response to medication: With intestinal ultrasound, you can receive early feedback as to whether a medication is effective. If there is ongoing evidence of inflammation, you and your child’s IBD specialist may decide to make a change in therapy in order to optimize their care.
- Assess for disease recurrence after surgery: If your child has had surgery as a part of there IBD treatment, intestinal ultrasound can help assess for early signs that the disease may have recurred. If this occurs, intestinal ultrasound can facilitate early treatment and intervention and help prevent their condition from progressing.
Benefits of Intestinal Ultrasound for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Intestinal ultrasound has many advantages for children with IBD. Specifically, intestinal ultrasound:
- It is not painful.
- Does not involve radiation or any safety risks.
- Does not require any preparation, such as fasting or drinking a “bowel prep,” as required before an endoscopic procedure.
- Allows you and your child’s doctor to see if their IBD is active or in remission at the time of appointment.
- Helps you and your child’s provider make immediate decisions about treatment when needed.
Research shows intestinal ultrasound is as accurate and even superior to several other tests used to monitor pediatric IBD. It has also been shown to be as accurate as endoscopic procedures (including colonoscopy) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for assessing disease activity in IBD.
Meet Our Intestinal Ultrasound for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease Provider
Dr. Amelia Kellar is the only provider to offer intestinal ultrasound for IBD patients at Comer Children’s. Intestinal ultrasound is available for established IBD patients at our River East location by Dr. Kellar (pediatric patients) and Dr. Krugliak Cleveland (adult patients).
Frequently Asked Questions about Intestinal Ultrasound for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Intestinal ultrasound is a revolutionary, noninvasive monitoring technology for pediatric IBD, allowing for frequent, accurate and non-invasive monitoring of disease activity.
Intestinal ultrasound can assess the degree of active inflammation in the bowel and identify any changes that may have occurred since your child’s last clinic visit. It can also assess how well their disease is responding to their current medications. If your child is having a disease relapse, intestinal ultrasound can validate what they are experiencing and help you and your child’s doctor make immediate changes to their treatment plan, preventing progression of disease.
While a pediatric IBD specialist may perform intestinal ultrasound as part of their diagnostic workup, an endoscopic procedure such as a colonoscopy or upper endoscopy with biopsies is needed to diagnose pediatric IBD.
Once your child has been diagnosed with IBD, intestinal ultrasound can aid pediatric IBD specialists at Comer Children’s monitor disease activity and assess response to IBD treatments.
Intestinal ultrasound cannot replace endoscopy for diagnosing pediatric IBD, but it can replace endoscopic assessments that are used to check for the presence or absence of inflammation. It also can be used to monitor how active your child’s disease is over time and assess how well a therapy is working.
No. Intestinal ultrasound is not used for colorectal cancer screening or surveillance.
Unlike many tests for IBD, intestinal ultrasound does not require any preparation. There is no need to drink water, fast or perform a bowel preparation before a doctor visit. Sometimes your child may be asked to drink a small amount of liquid before the exam, but this is not usually the case.
To begin an intestinal ultrasound, our specially trained pediatric IBD provider will put gel on your child’s abdomen and then pass a probe over the area to get real-time “pictures” of the intestines. You and your child’s doctor will see the same pictures on a screen, so you can talk about the results and discuss any potential changes to the treatment plan during the same visit. Typically, an intestinal ultrasound takes between 10 minutes to a half hour.
With a high degree of accuracy, this noninvasive test can show how much inflammation is in the intestines. It can also help doctors determine if your child has a bowel stricture (a narrowing in your intestines). In addition, an intestinal ultrasound can visualized complications such as fistulas (abnormal connections that may form between the intestines and other organs) or abscesses (areas where infected fluid can collect in the bowels).
For most kids with IBD, intestinal ultrasound is a valuable tool to monitor disease activity. But a small percentage of patients may not benefit from ongoing monitoring with intestinal ultrasound because of their specific anatomy or body composition, which can lead to poor quality images.
When you come to Comer Children’s, your child’s pediatric IBD specialist can help determine if intestinal ultrasound would be beneficial.
Most health plans cover intestinal ultrasound if your child has pediatric IBD and do not require a prior authorization.
UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s is home to one of the leading centers for IBD and one of only a few pediatric centers in the country to offer intestinal ultrasound for kids with pediatric IBD.
Our expert team includes a pediatric gastroenterologist (Dr. Kellar) who has received special training to perform intestinal ultrasound, and we also educate other physicians on this innovative, patient-centered technology.
To schedule an appointment with one of our pediatric IBD experts at Comer Children’s, please call 1-773-702-6169.