Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet © ECCO

Dear ECCO Family,

As you know, we are aiming that the ECCO Congress will be a physical one and that it will take place on February 16–19, 2022 in Vienna. This will be the first physical international IBD conference since ECCO 2020! We felt that we could not take the risk of losing the ECCO Spirit. ECCO is in great shape, as you will see in this issue of ECCO News.

Ignacio Catalán-Serra © Ignacio Catalán-Serra

Nuha Yassin  © ECCO

Dear ECCO Family and Friends,

Welcome to our Winter edition of ECCO News. Following the very successful ECCO Virtual Congress this summer, most of us have been working hard to prepare for the 17th ECCO Congress in February 2022. We hope that this will be a face-to-face Congress in Vienna, the home of ECCO. Looking at the current projections for Covid-19 over the next few months, we certainly remain hopeful that vaccinations and wearing PPE over the winter period will allow us to meet each other in order to share IBD knowledge and allow hearts and minds to interact in the New Year.

The Educational Programme of the 17^th Congress of ECCO starts prior to the official start of the ECCO Congress and courses take place from February 16-18, 2022. These activities target ECCO’s different interest groups including young gastroenterologists, surgeons, paediatricians, pathologists, IBD Nurses, dietitians, allied health professionals and scientists.

An overview of these activities can be found below. Please note that courses/workshops may run concurrently. As these educational activities have a limited capacity, we encourage you to register at your earliest convenience.

The Scientific Programme of the 17^th Congress of ECCO provides attendees the unique opportunity to learn from the world’s leading specialists in the field of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Held from Thursday to Saturday, February 17-19, 2022, the Scientific Programme is structured around basic science, translational medicine and clinical sessions. Additionally, it includes oral presentations of the 40 best abstracts of the Congress. The focus of all sessions is clinical practice founded on science with practical take home messages and, as every year, the congress registration fee includes access to all scientific sessions.

The Scientific Programme will be live transmitted at the time mentioned in the programme (CET). On-demand videos will be available to registered delegates until May 31, 2022.

ECCO’22 Theme: Navigating the oceans of IBD

We look forward to welcoming you at the 17^th Congress of ECCO in Vienna!

Michel Adamina © ECCO

Surgery is based on several principles that hold true across specialties and time trends: knowledge of the disease at hand and the surgical anatomy; understanding of the patient’s needs and values; interpersonal and communication skills; professionalism and practice-based learning in the decision to perform and the execution of a surgical procedure; and broad competencies in postoperative care and follow-up, in particular when treating patients with chronic diseases. Science, on the other hand, is led by curiosity and honesty with the desire to build knowledge and understanding of our world. In a world with limited resources and with care practice increasingly focusing on the individual needs of patients, tailored treatment is increasingly sought after. Hence, fostering excellent science in IBD surgery may translate into a quest for value-based, innovative ways of approaching disease states for which many possible treatment options exist.

Naila Arebi  © ECCO

The level of confidence in evidence generated by research is reflected in various aspects of study design and underpins clinical guidelines in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The quality of research study designs, each with inherent strengths and limitations, determines confidence in the results, and it is acknowledged that some ‘robust’ study designs may not be feasible in specific contexts [1, 2]. Experimental designs such as randomised controlled studies that are characterised by methodological rigour, may be unsuitable to study effectiveness owing to their weak external validity, which is attributable to their strict eligibility criteria. Reliance on complementary or alternative evidence from other study designs to address residual gaps in knowledge is not uncommon. Non-experimental observational study designs capture a more diverse population, albeit in a less stringent setting, resulting in several methodological limitations, including high risk of bias and unbalanced confounders [2]. The increasing digitalisation of medicine, in addition to accessible diverse sources of data, is partly responsible for recent intensification of interest in evidence generated by analysing data from observational studies with the purpose of offering new insights into the effectiveness and safety of interventions as well as understanding healthcare delivery and quality of care. The systematic analysis of data from multiple data sources outside a research setting is referred to as real-world studies (RWS), and its subsequent analysis and conclusions as real-world evidence (RWE) [3].

Pascal Juillerat  © ECCO

Dear ECCO Members,

I hope you and your families are well and you are looking forward to spending the Christmas holidays together, as far as this is possible.

In case you missed or would like to re-watch some of the content from the ECCO’21 Virtual Congress that took place last summer – we kindly ask you to visit our e-Library, where all of the recordings can be found.

Petra Hartmann  © ECCO

One of the main goals of ECCO is to promote IBD research as well as to foster interaction and productive collaboration among European research groups working in the IBD field. To achieve this goal, ECCO continues to award Grants, Fellowships and Travel Awards. ECCO offers IBD Nurses across Europe the opportunity to apply for the N-ECCO Travel Award and the N-ECCO Research Grant.

Catherine Wall  © ECCO

The low-residue diet has been a short-term dietary strategy to help reduce the symptoms of active Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis for at least the last half century. A longer term low-residue diet is also considered appropriate for a subset of patients with intestinal strictures [1], although the evidence to support this recommendation is limited and the type (fibrotic, inflammatory or both), severity (length of stricture and diameter of the bowel lumen), number of strictures and functional properties of certain foods likely impact tolerance of foods [1].

Pär Myrelid © ECCO

Many technical innovations are facilitating the education process involved in training a skilled surgeon today. At the same time, this process is in many ways still a joint collaboration between a master and his/her apprentice, and will continue to be so. Fruitful training in any practical setting is based on trust, from both parties, in combination with application of the experience of the master in order to sort out any perioperative complications. Beyond acquisition of the necessary technical skill, becoming a surgeon requires the development of a sound understanding of when to operate and when not to, as well as the ability to choose the right surgical option. This is, of course, important in all surgical fields but it is perhaps especially true within the field of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

In the last decade the traditional management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), based on clinically guided treatment intensification, has been revised and the so-called treat-to-target (T2T) approach, focusing on objective and scheduled measures to monitor intestinal inflammation, has been implemented in clinical practice, both in adults and in children. The general idea behind such tight monitoring is to prevent or block intestinal damage related to persistent and uncontrolled inflammation, and to avoid long-term complications.