Effects of steroids on length of stay in hospital after colon surgery among patients with Crohn’s disease.

Abstract: Crohn's disease, also known as Crohn's syndrome or localized enteritis, belongs to a group of conditions called Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD). A decent portion of patients with this disease require a surgery called ileocolectomy to reduce and control their symptoms, in which certain areas of the small and large intestines affected by the disease are removed. Before the surgery, patients newly diagnosed with Crohn's disease usually receive a short course of steroids therapy, which leads to significant improvement, and is then combined with drugs such as carcinogens or thiopurines to prevent recurrence. Since it’s quite a common procedure, the clinical surgeons are wondering how steroids affect patients’ length of stay (LOS) in hospital after ileocolectomy, which reflects how effective the treatment is on certain extent. This paper is trying to find out the effect of steroids on patients’ LOS in hospital after ileocolectomy based on data from TriNetx. TriNetx is a huge healthcare record database that covers up to 200 million population in the US. By using python and pyspark package, a final cohort table contains comorbidities, demographic information and all other related factors were selected for data analysis. T-test was used to perform numerical variables and chi square test was used to perform category variables. A muti-variable linear regression model was also used as a comparison for data analysis. At the end, the results show that steroids do have significant effect on increasing LOS by t-test but not significant once consider all variables in linear regression model. Advisor: Dr. Qiushi Chen