A recent study has found that when eosinophilic esophagitis is not treated, it can become progressive.

These findings demonstrate how important it is for patients to be regularly monitored and for their treatment to be maintained.

The Study

The full study included 705 patients who were all diagnosed with EoE around the same time. However, this portion of the findings came from a subset of this patient population (95) who all experienced a long gap in their care.

In this study, a gap is defined by a period without EoE treatment of 2 years or more. The average gap of care for these patients was 4.8 years.

Some of the prominent findings include:

• Increased chance of fibrosis development and those who did experience fibrosis had a longer gap than those who did not experience fibrosis
• One additional gap year in care increased chance of stricture by 26%
• Increased care gaps increased chance of food impactions
• Increased care gaps worsened endoscopic assessments
• Increased care gaps lowered average esophageal diameters

67 patients did not have fibrosis features prior to the gap in care. Of these, 25 ended up developing at least one feature during the gap of care such as narrowing or stricture.

Why Gaps in Care Occur

Gaps in care occurred for varying reasons in this patient population. These included a loss of insurance coverage and patients feeling only minor symptoms that didn’t both them enough to resume treatment.

Unfortunately, another reason may be a lack of follow-up recommendations coming from physicians themselves.

This is not solely the physician’s fault. There are no standardized guidelines regarding follow-up care for EoE. Physicians somewhat arbitrarily set follow-up care visits. These vary a lot between doctors and outcomes for patients vary too as a result.

What the data from this study shows is that a 2 year gap without follow-up care is too long. While further research is needed and is being conducted, this study provides important insight that monitoring EoE patients long-term is essential.

You can read more about this study here.