Azathioprine-induced acute pancreatitis in inflammatory bowel disease : natural history and severity spectrum

Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) may present with various extra-intestinal manifestations, in- cluding acute pancreatitis (AP) (1). Recent studies es- timate that up to 7% of patients with CD treated with azathioprine develop acute pancreatitis, which is not dose-dependent and generally occurs 4 to 6 weeks after the beginning of the drug (2). However the pathogenic mechanism is unknown (3). Our aim was to characterize the population of patients who developed azathioprine-induced AP in a tertiary referral center with a large number of treated IBD pa- tients. For that, we retrospectively identified all patients with IBD admitted to our Gastroenterology department for azathioprine-induced AP between January 2006 and December 2015.