Azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine for maintenance of remission in ulcerative colitis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Maintenance of remission is a major issue in inflammatory bowel disease. In ulcerative colitis, the evidence for the effectiveness of azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine for the maintenance of remission is still controversial. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effectiveness and safety of azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine for maintaining remission of ulcerative colitis. SEARCH STRATEGY: The MEDLINE database was used to search literature from 1966 to 2006. A manual search was also performed using references from these articles as well as review articles, proceedings from major gastrointestinal meetings and data available from the Cochrane Collaboration database. Authors of maintenance trials were asked about unpublished studies. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomized controlled trials of at least 12 months duration that compared azathioprine or 6-mercaptopurine with placebo or standard maintenance therapy (mesalamine) were included. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Data were extracted by two raters using standard forms. Disagreements were solved by informal consent, including a third rater. Jadad scores were applied to assess study quality. Analyses were performed separately by type of control (placebo, or active comparator). Pooled odds ratios were calculated based on the fixed effects model unless heterogeneity was shown. MAIN RESULTS: Six studies were identified including 286 patients with ulcerative colitis. The study quality was mostly poor. Azathioprine was shown to be superior for the maintenance of remission as compared to placebo based on four trials (failure to maintain remission: OR 0.41; 95% CI 0.24 to 0.70). Two trials that compared 6-mercaptopurine to mesalazine, or azathioprine to sulfasalazine showed significant heterogeneity. Both studies using active comparators were open label. Adverse effects occurred in 11 of 127 patients receiving azathioprine, including acute pancreatitis (3 cases) and significant bone marrow suppression (5 cases). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Azathioprine may be an effective maintenance therapy for patients who have failed or cannot tolerate mesalazine or sulfasalazine and for patients who require repeated courses of steroids. More research is needed to evaluate superiority over standard maintenance therapy, especially in the light of a potential for adverse events from azathioprine.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".