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. 2025 Mar 22;12(4):403.
doi: 10.3390/children12040403.

Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Romania: The First Epidemiological Study of the North-West Region (2000-2020)

Georgia Valentina Tartamus Tita  1 , Daniela Elena Serban  2 , Cristina Rebeca Fogas  1 , Marcel Vasile Tantau  3
Affiliations

Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Romania: The First Epidemiological Study of the North-West Region (2000-2020)

Georgia Valentina Tartamus Tita et al. Children (Basel). .

Abstract

Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) represents a group of disorders with increasing incidence in the pediatric population worldwide. There are limited data on pediatric IBD (pIBD) epidemiology in Eastern Europe and none so far from Romania. The aim of our study was to evaluate incidence rates and time trends for pIBD in the north-west region of Romania and to compare them with results from studies on the same topic published worldwide. Methods: We performed a retrospective study of patients under 18 years of age diagnosed with pIBD in the time frame between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2020 at the Emergency Clinical Hospital for Children in Cluj-Napoca. Age-adjusted incidence rates, annual percentage change (APC), average annual percentage chance (AAPC) and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated for pIBD, Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Temporal trends were plotted using Joinpoint regression. Results: Ninety-four patients were identified. For the entire studied period, the incidence rate for pIBD was 0.79/105 (±0.74), 0.4/105 for CD (±0.42) and 0.34/105 for UC (±0.4). Time trends for incidence were positive, but statistical significance was found only for pIBD and CD. The APC observed for pIBD, CD and UC was 12 (95% CI: 6.5-17.7), 13.1 (95% CI: 8-18.5) and 5.67 (95% CI: 1.5-13.4), respectively. Comparison to other similar studies placed Romania among the countries with the lowest incidence of pIBD. Conclusions: Although pIBD incidence in our region appears to be low, there has been an important and significant increase in the incidence of overall pIBD and especially CD.

Keywords: Crohn’s disease; incidence; inflammatory bowel disease; temporal trends; ulcerative colitis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Temporal trend for pIBD age-adjusted incidence rates for period 2000–2020.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Temporal trend for pediatric CD age-adjusted incidence rates for period 2000–2020.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Temporal trend for pediatric UC age-adjusted incidence rates for period 2000–2020.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Pediatric IBD incidence in different regions of the world between 1995 and 2010 [12,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46] (the authors summed CD and UC incidence for Bosnia–Herzegovina and calculated the mean IBD incidence for Germany).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Pediatric IBD incidence in different regions of the world between 2009 and 2020 [12,25,27,33,36,40,44,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54] (for South Korea, the authors calculated the mean incidence).
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