Pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) specialists at Mayo Clinic Children's collaborate with you to provide advanced, comprehensive care. We combine the latest medical and surgical innovations with a focus on improving long-term outcomes for children and adolescents with IBD.
We have a lot of experience and a lot of training here at the Mayo Clinic taking care of children with inflammatory bowel disease. We know we can't take care of every kid at all times, so you know, communication with the local provider is very important communicating in real time. Is a is a great way to understand if there's a good likelihood that we can help uh and and that can actually expedite getting patients in to see us. Some of the patients that might benefit from coming to be seen at the IBD program at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center would be patients who have refractory disease, uh, that's not responding to conventional therapies, patients that need to see multiple specialists to get a coordinated plan. A big advantage of Mayo is we have dedicated pediatric specialists we've created a child friendly environment, but we also have the advantage of the entire organization so to be able to come and see a rheumatologist, a gastroenterologist, have all of the appropriate imaging and testing and have that happen. In a concise timely visit, the vast majority of the time that kid's gonna be doing fine receiving all their treatments at home, but it's also important to have a backstop for when things aren't going so well or when families need reassurance or a small change to their treatment, you know, to have access to the specialist at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center. Um, is very important. We have gastroenterologists that are on the cutting edge of technology. They're using all the latest medications and when those medications don't work or if they're not right for that child, then we have all the latest technologies in surgery. Being an American College of Surgeons Level One Children's surgery program means that we follow our results very closely, so we are benchmarked to other hospitals across the United States. We have people kind of at all levels of development as of research and understanding these diseases. People in basic science labs, people doing clinical trials and people trying to translate what we're learning in the lab to new therapies. At the Mayo Clinic we've been doing inflammatory bowel disease surgery since the 1980s. In general, the vast majority of surgeries minimally invasive, which speeds recovery, decreases pain, allows kids to get back to what they're doing much more quickly. Longer term, meaning months after surgery, we start to see their nutritional status improve. We see a lot of catch up growth after surgery for inflammatory bowel disease. And when you look at their outcomes as far as you know uh participation in sports and uh daily activities, those sorts of things, those outcomes are excellent for 20-30 years. We take pride in taking care of these kids, so it's something that we enjoy doing, and we really want kids to be healthy and get back to what they they should be doing as children and you know with new medications and surgical innovations, you know. Kids and their families can get through this and and get back to a normal life.
