Association of appendectomy with disease phenotype and clinical course in Crohn's disease: results from two cohorts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The appendix, as a component of the digestive system, plays a role in intestinal immunity. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the association between appendectomy history and disease phenotype/progression in Crohn's disease patients. DESIGN: Two cohorts from a single center. PATIENTS: Patients with Crohn's disease diagnosed between 2011 and 2021, including those without surgery and those undergoing their first surgery for Crohn's disease. METHODS: Patients were divided into surgical and non-surgical cohorts, each further split into appendectomy and non-appendectomy groups. RESULTS: In the non-surgical cohort, significant phenotypic disparities were observed between appendectomy-only and non-appendectomy groups across Montreal classification parameters, including age (p < 0.001), location (p = 0.03), and behavior (p = 0.01), with reduced perianal lesion prevalence in appendectomy patients (15% (9/60) vs. 35.7% (162/454), p = 0.001). Appendectomy patients exhibited later disease onset (IQR36 vs. 24 years, p < 0.001) and diagnosis (IQR37 vs. 26 years, p < 0.001). In the surgical cohort, significant differences emerged among non-appendectomy, appendectomy-only, and ileocecal resection groups in Montreal classification parameters: age at diagnosis (p = 0.014), location (p < 0.001), and behavior (p = 0.003). Disease progression timelines differed markedly, with later onset (IQR 29 vs. 27 vs. 25 years, p < 0.001), diagnosis (IQR 31 vs. 30 vs. 27 years, p < 0.001), and surgery (IQR 35 vs. 33 vs. 31 years, p < 0.001) observed in appendectomy-only patients. Surgical management varied significantly, including diagnosis-to-surgery intervals (mean 3.4 vs. 2.6 vs. 3.7 years, p < 0.001), perianal lesion (29.3% (123/420) vs. 24.4% (39/160) vs. 35.3% (173/490), p = 0.02), and one-stage surgery (36.2% (152/420) vs. 75.6% (120/160) vs. 66.1% (324/490), p < 0.001). LIMITATIONS: Retrospective analysis with potential data biases. CONCLUSION: Despite notable differences in disease phenotype, appendectomy does not seem to influence the clinical course of Crohn's disease. However, it seems to be associated with the lower risk of perianal disease and alleviates the severity of their condition.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".