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Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal tract. As the novel therapeutic goal and biologicals are widely recognized, accurate assessment of disease and prediction of therapeutic response have become a crucial challenge in clinical practice. Also, because of the continuously rising incidence, convenient and economical methods of diagnosis and clinical assessment is urgently needed. Recently, serum biomarkers have made a great progress and become a focus in IBD study since they are non-invasive, convenient, and relatively inexpensive compared to using markers in biopsy tissue, stool, breath, and other body fluids. Aims: To review the available data on serological biomarkers for IBD. Methods: We searched PubMed using pre-defined key words on relevant literatures of serum biomarkers regarding diagnosis, evaluation of therapeutic efficacy, surveillance of disease activity, and assessment of prognosis for IBD. Results: We reviewed serological biomarkers that are well-established and widely-used (e.g., C-reactive protein), newly discovered biomarkers (e.g., cytokines, antibodies, non-coding RNAs), and also recently advance in serological biomarkers (e.g., metabolomics, proteomics) that are used in different aspects of IBD management. Conclusions: With such a wealth of researches, there is still no ideal serum biomarkers for IBD to date. Serum profiling and non-coding RNAs are just started to blossom but reveal great promise for future clinical practice. Combining different biomarkers can be valuable in improving performance of disease evaluation.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.