Crohn's disease (CD) is a chronic, inflammatory disease that can affect all parts and layers of the digestive tube and is one of the major forms of chronic inflammatory bowel disease. There is no cure for CD yet, so the primary purpose of treatment is to achieve remission. According to the official recommendations of The European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology Hepatology and Nutrition, nutritional therapy with exclusive enteral nutrition (EEN) is used as the first line therapy in the treatment of children. Since the mentioned therapy is long-lasting and strenuous for many patients, as they consume the same amount of enteral preparation with constantly the same taste, consistency and colour every day for six weeks, while they can only add water, not many can go through with it. Therefore we wanted to compare it to partial enteral nutrition (PEN), which is supposed to be easier for patients, since it partially allows them to eat normal foods, which is expected to have a beneficial effect on patient participation. At the same time, we were interested in the socio-demographic and eating characteristics of patients and how their eating habits changed during treatment. The study involved 22 patients under the age of 18 with active form of CB. The first group of patients was treated with EEN and the second with PEN in combination with an anti-inflammatory diet. After treatment period, clinical analyses revealed that both therapies were equally effective and that 82 % of patients in both groups achieved clinical remission. We did not find any differences in identifying which therapy was easier for patients, but we found that PEN caused less nausea in 17 % patients. We also found that during the treatment of CD children learned the principles of healthy eating that were presented to them by clinical dietitian. Therefore the clinical impact of EEN and PEN was the same, while treatment with PEN was easier for patients.
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