Surgical strategies to reduce recurrence in Crohn's disease

Almost from the time of initial description of Crohn's disease 85 years ago, it has been known that surgical resection is not curative. The disease invariably recurs. Over this period of time, numerous strategies have been proposed in an attempt to reduce the recurrence rate, or delay the development of recurrent disease. The purpose of this review is to examine a number of strategies and to evaluate their effectiveness. It also aims to look at what might lie ahead in the future. This review consists of an English language literature search to identify previous studies that have proposed various surgical strategies to reduce the recurrence rate following surgery for Crohn's disease. A number of surgical strategies have been proposed including widening the resection margins, changing the type of anastomosis, use of laparoscopy, and most recently, resecting wide mesenteric margins. To date, none of these strategies has proven to be effective in reducing recurrence rates. Although a surgical strategy to reduce recurrence in Crohn's disease has not been identified, there are currently investigators looking at other possibilities that may be shown to be effective in the future.