Anticardiolipin antibodies in a patient with Crohn's disease and thrombosis.

Thrombosis is an uncommon though well recognized complication of inflammatory bowel disease, for which various coagulation alterations have been described as possible causes. Antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is defined as the association of thrombosis, fetal loss and thrombocytopenia with anticardiolipin antibodies (aCL) and/or lupus anticoagulant (LA). We describe a case of a 21-year-old female with recurrent thrombosis associated with aCL who went on to develop Crohn's disease. Tissue typing done in this patient revealed the presence of the HLA-DR7, DRw53, which previous studies have shown to be found in increased frequencies in APS patients. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an association between these two clinical conditions and, in this particular case, aCL may be implicated in the thrombotic events.