Rare disease Crohn's disease, I changed the direction of intestinal stitching...Complications. "Duck".

[Anchor]
Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, is not easy to treat enough to have one in four patients undergo reoperation due to complications at the surgical site.

Researchers in Korea have changed the direction of stitching the intestine during Crohn's disease surgery, reducing the incidence of complications by half.

This is reporter Park Na-yeon.

[Reporter]
Mr. A, a job applicant in his 20s, has been suffering from Crohn's disease for more than 10 years.

When I was in middle school, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at a hospital where I visited because I went to the bathroom more often than my peers.

[Cron disease patient A in his 20s: I think going to the bathroom was the most stressful thing. [I think I was nervous thinking that I might want to go to the bathroom again]

[Reporter]
Crohn's disease is a chronic disease that repeatedly gets better and worse due to inflammation of the entire intestine, and it is one of the typical incurable diseases.

If complications such as intestinal obstruction or perforation lead to a large amount of bleeding, you will eventually have to perform surgery.

I need to cut and sew some of the intestines that are in trouble, but the surgical site is wide, so I use staplers rather than needles and threads.

The existing surgical method was to sew the cut section horizontally after cutting the intestine, and researchers at Asan Medical Center developed a method of sewing it vertically at 90 degrees.

In this way, the connection area is wider than before, so less food or feces accumulate in the intestine, reducing inflammation and recurrence rates.

To compare the effectiveness of the two surgical methods, the researchers conducted an experiment on more than 200 Crohn's disease patients who underwent intestinal resection for three years starting in 2020.

As a result, the incidence of complications was nearly halved within a month after surgery in the patient group to which the new surgical method was applied.

In particular, the incidence of intestinal obstruction with blocked intestines was noticeably reduced by more than two-thirds.

In addition, when comparing the average length of hospital stay and the amount of bleeding after surgery, the new surgery has a good prognosis for surgery and a faster recovery rate.

[Yoon Yongsik / Professor of colorectal surgery at Asan Medical Center: Looking at these patients for a long time for 5, 10 years, I think it's a way to help patients around the world if we get the results that we expected]

[Reporter]
Crohn's disease has been recognized as a disease that began mainly in young people from their teens to their 30s and follows them throughout their lives.

It is a rare disease, but if you are treated steadily, you can live a normal life, and it is expected that the newly developed surgical method will improve the quality of life after surgery.

I'm Park Nayeon of YTN Science.