Brown Medicine opens new Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center

BROWN MEDICINE has opened a new Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Brown Physicians Patient Center on Wampanoag Trail in East Providence. / COURTESY BROWN MEDICINE
BROWN MEDICINE has opened a new Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Brown Physicians Patient Center on Wampanoag Trail in East Providence. / COURTESY BROWN MEDICINE

EAST PROVIDENCE – Brown Medicine has opened a new Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Brown Physicians Patient Center on Wampanoag Trail as part of its Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, announcing the launch of the new center the weekend of World IBD Day on May 19 in recognition of the awareness-raising event.

The IBD Center at 375 Wampanoag Trail, Suite 202A, is run by Dr. Sean Fine and Dr. Abbas Rupawala. Fine trained at Brown University and gained experience in IBD at the University of California San Francisco and an IBD apprenticeship at Beth Israel Deaconess. Rupawala completed his training at the University of Massachusetts Worcester and an IBD apprenticeship at the University of Pittsburgh. The center’s care team consists of a nurse practitioner, nutritionist and social workers along with other medical specialists the team works closely with to play an important role in delivering holistic care to patients diagnosed with the disease.

“Our Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center aims to deliver and coordinate care for patients with IBD, particularly with a focus on serving adults, pediatric patients transitioning care into adulthood and pregnant women,” said Fine, Brown Medicine IBD Center director and assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “Our goal is to provide a well-functioning center where patients’ clinical and educational needs are met with expertise and commitment from a multidisciplinary treatment team within our Brown Physicians network. This level of comprehensive care for people of all ages is unique to our community, and can eliminate the need for people to travel to Boston for care.”

According to a study led by Hasbro Children’s Hospital published in 2016 in the journal Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Rhode Island has one of the highest rates ever reported in the United States for incidence of inflammatory bowel disease.

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A total of 971 Rhode Islanders were identified as having IBD by the study team. This is an average incidence of approximately 30 cases of IBD per 100,000 persons in this three-year time frame, with 15.1 and 13.9 per 100,000 diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, respectively. In comparison, Minnesota previously reported an incidence of 8.8 and 7.9 per 100,000 for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, respectively, from 1990-2000, while Northern California reported incidences of 12 and 6.3 for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, respectively, from 1996-2002.

“Most chronic diseases such as IBD require a multidisciplinary approach to treatment involving psychiatry, nutrition, radiology, pathology, colorectal surgery and infusion specialists,” said Rupawala, associate director of the Brown Medicine IBDC and assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “Care is rapidly evolving and becoming highly complex. Dr. Fine and I devote all of our time, energy and training to this complicated disease.”

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease are being cared for better than they ever had been in the past, according to Rupawala.

“In the past five years, several new medications have been approved by the FDA for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and as many as 50 investigational agents are in the pipeline,” Rupawala said. “This is how quickly the research and advances are progressing for this disease. The earliest signs of IBD typically present to primary care doctors, so having the ability to recognize and refer to specialists at our IBD Center is critical to patients to receive proper timely care. Our goal is to intervene early to halt disease progression and prevent unnecessary surgical interventions.”

The IBD Center is currently in the process of arranging to be a study site for new novel agents used in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, Fine said.

“There are no current places in Rhode Island that offer investigational medications and with the establishment of the IBD Center, we hope to be able to provide this for patients,” he said.

Rob Borkowski is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Borkowski@PBN.com.

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