Health-Risk Behaviors and Chronic Conditions Among Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease — United States, 2015 and 2016

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, involves chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. In 2015, an estimated 3.1 million adults in the United States had ever received a diagnosis of IBD (1). Nationally representative samples of adults with IBD have been unavailable or too small to assess relationships between IBD and other chronic conditions and health-risk behaviors (2). To assess the prevalence of health-risk behaviors and chronic conditions among adults with and without IBD, CDC aggregated survey data from the 2015 and 2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). An estimated 3.1 million (unadjusted lifetime prevalence = 1.3%) U.S. adults had ever received a diagnosis of IBD. Adults with IBD had a significantly lower prevalence of having never smoked cigarettes than did adults without the disease (55.9% versus 63.5%). Adults with IBD had significantly higher prevalences than did those without the disease in the following categories: having smoked and quit (26.0% versus 21.0%; having met neither aerobic nor muscle-strengthening activity guidelines (50.4% versus 45.2%); reporting <7 hours of sleep, on average, during a 24-hour period (38.2% versus 32.2%); and having serious psychological distress (7.4% versus 3.4%). In addition, nearly all of the chronic conditions evaluated were more common among adults with IBD than among adults without IBD. Understanding the health-risk behaviors and prevalence of certain chronic conditions among adults with IBD could inform clinical practice and lead to better disease management.