Julie Auzoux, Gilles Boschetti, Widad Lahlou, Alexandre Aubourg, Alban Girault, Thierry Lecomte, William Raoul, Stephane Nancey, Laurence Picon, Bernard Flourie and Driffa Moussata
In recent decades, the advent of biological therapy has changed the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and has opened new therapeutic endpoints such as mucosal healing (MH). MH incorporated with clinical remission presents a new concept: deep remission, which correlates with a decrease in hospitalization and surgery and improvement in the patient’s quality of life. Several techniques can be used to assess mucosal healing such as endoscopy which remains the gold standard. But considerable variations may exist in the interpretation of the definition of mucosal healing which may also be histological or evaluated by radiological or biological methods. Thus, it is important to study mucosal inflammation by endoscopic scores and by new, more sensitive techniques such as videocapsule endoscopy (VCE), magnetic resonance enterography (MRE), chromoendoscopy and confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE). Biomarkers, such as fecal calprotectin (FC) were also studied in the evaluation of MH and showed positive results. These methods are currently the subject of validation studies.