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Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are characterized by similar geographic distributions. Dr Amnon Sonnenberg and colleagues used a large database of pathology reports to analyze the geographic distribution of microscopic colitis and compare it with those of Culcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. The team noted that a population of 671,176 individual patients with colonic biopsies was studied stratified by gender and state of residence. The occurrence of each diagnosis microscopic colitis, ulcerative colitis, or Crohn's disease, was expressed as proportional rate per 1000 colonoscopies with biopsies from each individual state. The researchers found that ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease tended to be common in states in the Northeast or North Central regions of the USA, and relatively rare among several southern states.  | | Ulcerative colitis tended to be common in states in the Northeast | | Inflammatory Bowel Diseses |
Microscopic colitis appeared to follow a somewhat inverse pattern, as it was most common among some states from the Southwest and other states of southern latitude, such as Florida, Georgia, California, but relatively uncommon among states in the Northeast. The research team found that the geographic distributions of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease were significantly correlated with each other. No significant correlation was observed between microscopic colitis and ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. Dr Sonnenberg's concluded "The differences in epidemiologic behavior point at a dissimilar set of risk factors that shape the occurrence of microscopic colitis as opposed to ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease."
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