What's New in Diagnosing Diverticular Disease

Abstract

In this session different issues for the diagnosis of diverticular disease (DD) were considered including "Biomarkers", "Computer tomography", "Ultrasonography in detecting acute diverticulitis", "Endoscopy" and "The DICA classification: a new predictive tool in managing diverticular disease". Most patients affected by DD suffer from recurrent attacks of abdominal pain without evidence of an active inflammatory process, causing a difficult differential diagnosis with other intestinal conditions. Several biomarkers, serological, fecal, urinary and genetic were considered, but recent studies confirmed that only CRP and fecal calprotectin are matching with the criteria for an ideal biomarker for DD. Colonoscopy still remains the gold standard for the diagnosis of DD, playing a key role in many clinical settings, such as colonic diverticular bleeding, or to differentiate inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and segmental colitis associated with diverticulosis (SCAD); Moreover, in 2015 has been developed the DICA (Diverticular Inflammation and Complication Assessment) endoscopic classification that considers 10 different parameters, each one with a score, and the sum of items scores represents the severity of the disease; in this way the endoscopic exam would be able to predict the outcome of DD for each patient. On the other hand, computer tomography (CT) is the gold standard for acute diverticulitis (AD) with an excellent sensitivity and specificity; recently, metanalysis of prospective studies have shown that intestinal ultrasonography (IUS) and CT have the same sensitivity for the diagnosis of an AD and the advantage is that IUS is less expensive, non-invasive and easily accessible.