Faecal calprotectin is sky-high

Mine was always around 1300 but my doc never seemed to panic over it

blksteeda said...
Mine was always around 1300 but my doc never seemed to panic over it

Have you had a calprotectin test done since takedown surgery?

suzy-q said...
Husband's GI didn't put much weight on CRP. He focused more on the symptoms as a marker of what was going on.

That's a first: a GI who disregarded clinical markers and focused on symptoms.

I was actually asking about calprotectin and not CRP, but while we're on the subject it is true that some people's CRP never rises (the actual cause why seems to be a bit of a mystery). For those people, monitoring their CRP is going to be useless. However for everyone else, CRP is a pretty reliable indicator of non-specific inflammation/infection in the body. For me CRP has always been a valuable marker, since the only source of inflammation I have is the Crohn's.

More valuable than the faecal calprotectin, probably. That's partly what I'm trying to find out but what nobody seems to know - including, I rather suspect, the doctors themselves.

Okay that's a first! Never heard of the faecal calprotectin test changing accuracy over time. Nor the CRP actually. Symptoms aren't always the most reliable guide to disease activity so I wonder if your inflammation had reduced but for whatever reason the symptoms hadn't? Also, a CRP that's less than 45 definitely is not normal. Most NHS hospitals take 7.5 or 10 as the cutoff point for a 'normal' CRP value. 40 is not as high as 121, but objectively it is still quite high and indicates significant inflammation or infection.

In my case the situation is complicated still further by no longer having a colon. It may make no difference, but again I'm not sure of that and nor is probably anybody else.

I never had high CRP and I've had unreliable calprotectin results. Id be really interested to see what mine is now that I've had surgery. I don't have "symptoms" perse, but I also don't have formed, normal stools. I know they say that shouldn't have impact on the result.

Have you had any type of scope to see what's going on? Have you tried any types of antibiotics?

I always thought higher was worse when it comes to calprotectin.

@Martha - Saying your CRP is "less than 45" sounds vague as f... It could be anything from 1 to 44. I don't get that. Did they take biopsies from your sigmoidoscopy? Unfortunately clear tests are a death knell to doctors taking you seriously. Maybe it's possible that a small but problematic patch of inflammation was missed or something - I dunno.

@nssg - I've always had high CRP when flaring. Apparently a sigmoidoscopy has been requested - I only found out about it today. It came as a surprise, as nobody told me about it. And I had one only a few months ago (it showed inflammation - my GI and surgeon contradicted themselves quite a bit on how bad it was).

No antibiotics. Have thought about asking for them, but I'm not keen. They don't seem to last, even if they do work initially. And when I took them in hospital a few years ago, they definitely did not work. If I was going to try anything I'd be most interested in the anti-MAP protocol, since I have Crohn's. (Or at least I hope it's Crohn's. My surgeon managed to tell me it wasn't that a few months ago. *shakes head*)

@ewa - Hmm. Well, my other inflammatory markers are raised. I also feel like I'm having too many symptoms to be in remission. Technically, I was classed as being in remission (and probably still am until further tests show otherwise), but I have never felt like I was in remission. I think the assumption was based on the Entocort decreasing my inflammatory markers but that seems to have reversed itself.

Bit weird that you got such a high result when genuinely in remission. There's a few meds which can raise calprotectin levels, but I dunno if by that much. I do wonder about this test, although so far it seems to have been fairly accurate for me - for example it was only 59 when I was genuinely in remission after my first surgery.

Dikid said...
Fcp elevates before we are symptomatic. lol. It also elevates before crp does.

I didn't know either of those two <_<.

As for meds which raise FC I confess to taking the occasional ibuprofen. Could ibupfrofen really raise FC levels by that much? I can't even remember the last time I took one. Usually take paracetamol and codeine for pain now. (The latter of which I can only take because my parents give me it! Ridiculous situation. When I next see my GI I'm going to ask him to ask my GP prescribe me codeine - have to jump through these sort of hoops to get anything stronger than paracetamol.)

Digestive Disease Week 2016?

Is there a video link to that talk by David Rubin, do you know?