Hello. I’m Dr David Johnson, professor of medicine and chief of gastroenterology at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia. Welcome back to another GI Common Concerns.
I wanted to chat with you today about new recommendations for best practice strategies in the management of colonic diverticulitis from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), which build upon guidelines from 2015. In this latest update, the authors provide 14 recommendations for changes to common practices that I think are very sensible.
Diverticulitis is a common disease in the United States, accounting for approximately 1.9 million outpatient visits and over 200,000 inpatient hospitalizations, with an economic burden over $5.5 billion annually.
Approximately 12% of patients with incident disease have de novo complications. A subset of 5% of patients who have diverticulitis also have smoldering diverticular disease following continued therapy, with persistent abdominal symptoms and inflammatory changes seen on CT imaging. This is notably different from segmental colitis associated with diverticulosis (or SCAD), which is more like inflammatory bowel disease.