Pain management in inflammatory bowel disease

Acute abdominal pain during episodes of inflammation is common among patients with IBD, and generally disappears rapidly with appropriate medical therapy. In the moderate number of patients in which abdominal pain persists and becomes chronic, central mechanisms of pain modulation are likely to play the primary role in pain persistence, and some of these mechanisms are shared by patients with irritable bowel syndrome and other chronic pain disorders. In these situations, multidisciplinary care is most effective, and pain should be addressed with a combination of brain–gut behavioral therapies and neuromodulators early in the course of treatment.