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Can Crohn's just be isolated to your rectum?

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Crohn's Disease
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Posted 6/8/2009 4:31 PM (GMT 0)
Sorry, this is kind of a duplicate question, I have been diagnosed with severe ulcerative proctitis in the rectum only, however I also have anal fistulas so they are querying Crohn's, I'm trying to make sense of all of this, but the absence of granulomas in the biopsies caused them to rule out Crohns in the first instance. I'm assuming that the treatment for Crohn's is similar to that of ulcerative colitis?
Any insight would be gratefully appreciated.
Posted 6/8/2009 6:18 PM (GMT 0)
Yes, you can have activity just in the rectom with crohn's (it's still referred to as proctitis) with UC disease activity tends to start in the rectom (but nothing is written in stone either) and move up into the colon only and no further...fistulas are definitely more CD related and tend to be awfully rare with UC so I can understand why your doc is leaning towards CD....hopefully further testing will finally get you a concrete DX very soon.

:)
Posted 6/8/2009 6:28 PM (GMT 0)
pb4 has already given you a great answer, so I'll just add that you're right, the treatments for both diseases are similar. With fistulas, however, they might want to give you an antibiotic called metronidazole (Flagyl), which can help clear them up. I'm not sure that Flagyl is used very often in ulcerative colitis, but I don't know much about UC so I might be wrong.
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