To find out more visit ►
Over the last 10 years or so we’ve increasingly turned to use of so-called biological or injection based treatments to help us to control the inflammation in crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis so we’ll think about these treatments in you particularly if you have certain patterns of disease or if the inflammation is proving unusually difficult to manage or
Unusually difficult to settle down and particularly where for example as the theory norma captor purine are not proving sufficient to adequately control the inflammation in that context we’re going to think about injection based treatments some of which are given in hospital with regular infusions usually every eight weeks although that can be adjusted or they’re
Given at home self administered at home and to some extent there’s a bit of flexibility around which of those treatment options we go for and we can discuss that with you at the point that we’re talking about these therapists just to see which one of those approaches would achieve you best when patients arrive on the unit their personal details are checked and then
That allocated you’ll be allocated a chair a set of observations will be done so just checking temperature and blood pressure and heart rate then a trained nurse will come and have a chat with you just to see your general well-being are there any obvious signs of infection are there any concerns once those have been checked then somebody will place a cannula and
We tend to use quite small ones for the treatment takes and bloods which are taken for before every infusion and then the nurses will go and make the actual drug usually during the infusion patients don’t feel any side effects but obviously if there were any concerns and we encourage patients to just let one of the nurses know so that they can be reassessed some
Patients report feeling a little bit washed out after the infusion but for the most part patients generally feel ok whenever we make an infliximab infusion bag we ensure that we make it bespoke to a patient dose these bags are very expensive and so there’s a risk that if if you miss your appointment that the bag could be wasted for a chance to be able to reuse
The medication we need you to let us know in advance if you can’t attend i was quite apprehensive at the beginning starting it because i previously only taken oral medication so this was going to be new experience for me i would have to go and have infusions in a day unit in the hospital so that would mean you know a day out of my working life to go and receive
Treatment it would i’ll be there for a couple of hours during the day and you know it was it was quite overwhelming but when i started the treatment i had a chat with our specialist nurses and they really helped me you know get to grips what was going on and then i just brought family along for the infusions at the beginning so that i had company when i went in
It would take a while to get going so i’d have some blood tests and then you know they’d start infusion afterwards i’d have to wait around for a little while just to make sure i was feeling well after the infusion so it was quite a long long and tiring day but the benefits i had when i was on the infliximab treatment and when i had been on it for a couple of
Weeks it was noticeable i was my quality of life beforehand you know was was good but after i started the infliximab it was great i felt like a different person it’s just made me have a normal life you know get married have a great job i have a wonderful baby i didn’t have any relapses i didn’t have any problems throughout my pregnancy and never had any side
Effects neither did my my child so it was it was something i never thought i was going to be able to do i would say that these are a highly effective way of managing inflammatory bowel disease there are to some extent the magic bullet that everybody’s talked about for a long time they’re not perfect they don’t treat everybody and get everybody completely well
But they are powerful therapies they’re expensive therapies but they’re based on a better understanding of what actually causes the inflammation in the gut they’re more targeted in many senses and certainly safe so for patients in whom the the treating team have decided that that’s the right approach to go for then i fully support people just locking into those
Treatments sticking with the treatment regimen as is prescribed don’t pick and mix don’t fail to turn up to appointments or you know see the drugs in the fridge and say well actually i don’t feel like it today stick with the regimen and they’ll really help you to get well get better and carry on with your normal life which is what we’re all
Transcribed from video
Biologics Infusion Therapy By crohnsandcolitisuk