A prospective comparison study of MRI versus small bowel follow through in recurrent Crohn's disease

Crohn's disease has its peak age of onset in the third decade (1). Since there is no known cure, and it typically runs a relapsing course, patients are recurrently reinvestigated. In North America, a standard approach to reassessing small bowel disease is to use oral barium and a small bowel follow-through (SBFT). The SBFT has long been a standard radiological approach to the investigation for small bowel Crohn's disease. It is thought to be a reliable and acceptable approach to imaging the small bowel by experts provided that it is a dedicated study, incorporating fluoroscopy with manual palpation (2). Some prefer a small bowel enteroclysis (SBE) (3,4) using a nasoenteric tube; however, our group has previously shown that SBFT can be at least as sensitive as SBE and is preferred by patients as no nasal intubation is required (5).NRC publication: Ye