Clinical activity assessment in inflammatory bowel disease.

Standardized methods of making and recording clinical observations of patients with inflammatory bowel disease are needed for the conduct of controlled clinical trials and for the application of the results of such trials to clinical practice. A number of attempts to develop such methods have been made since the early 1950s, and such efforts continue at present. A universally accepted and acceptable clinical instrument to measure the disease activity of either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis will probably never be achieved. However, if interested clinicians can agree on a basic set of observations and how to make and record them, accurate comparisons of therapeutic outcomes across time and space will become possible. Toward this goal several groups of clinicians are currently working.