| The definition and dynamic monitoring of current treatment targets will hopefully improve the treatment efficacy and may aid to achieve more ambitious treatment goals in IBD patients. This will pave the way to personalized and individualized IBD therapy hopefully resulting in better short- and long-term outcomes in patients with IBD ultimately altering the long-term natural disease course of this often disabling inflammatory bowel diseases. Of note, new treatment algorithms need to implement time-dependent and realistic treatment targets that encompass short- medium- and long-term treatment targets. Current treatment targets comprise subjective targets like patient reported outcomes (PROs) and more objective outcomes like defined targets of biochemical tests, e.g. CRP and Calprotectin, endoscopy, histology and cross-sectional imaging, e.g. intestinal ultrasound and MR enterography. The plethora of targets may be combined to result in more comprehensive definitions of treatment goals resulting in newly proposed treatment goals like disease clearance in ulcerative colitis or transmural healing in Crohn's disease or holistic/ comprehensive remission in both diseases. The emergence of new treatment targets has led to the development of new treatment and monitoring algorithms and more complex treatment options that can achieve the above mentioned very stringent treatment goals in a relevant number of patients with IBD. It is important to appreciate that treatment targets may be differently valued by patients and health care professionals, but also payers and licensing authorities, and general consensus among the different stakeholders will be needed in the future. |
