CelltrionHealthcare

2. The challenges of living with IBD through the life course 

The impact depends according to age for sure. When they are very young, the main problem is school and also social relationships because when people are telling you ‘Can we please go out together?’ ‘Can we go to a party?’ ‘Can we have a dinner together?’ It’s very tough for them because sometimes they feel that they cannot eat normally, they have too much fatigue so they cannot go out too late in the evening so this is for young people, but also for school they will miss some days of school because you know when you have a flare…So the impact is very big for young people.

When it’s middle age, it’s becoming a little bit different. So after school when they have their job, the main problem is that we know that for job you need a good performance and sometimes they cannot have the level of performance that they would like to get and importantly when they want to get better position, when they want to move forward in their career, sometimes this is a barrier, a big barrier for their lives. Also what is very important is that they cannot accept every position when they work at the office. Sometimes also they want to be close to the toilet, so they have to adapt their job everyday according to the disease.

When it’s becoming more older people I would say, the main problem is that [for] these people, the impact is also huge because … they have to rush to toilets for instance when they have bowel urgency or whatever it becomes more and more difficult for them to walk, to run and so on. So, the disease I mean you can have more fecal incontinence, you would have abdominal pain and so on. So when you are becoming elderly people, the impact is also dramatically increasing for these patients also because sometimes they cannot be treated the same. So, at every age it’s different, but overall we should keep in mind that this is [a] disease with a lot of disability, very disabling and chronic for life.