Thank you to my family and friends for generously donating to my Take Steps fundraising to benefit the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. As someone who has had Crohn's disease for more than 12 years, finding a cure is a passion of mine, and near and dear to my heart. My family and I really appreciate all of the support we've received to further the progress to fund research, and support services. To learn more about how your donation will be used, please see the following information from the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Rest assured, your donation is making a difference - now more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic is putting an enormous financial strain on our fundraising efforts, both in terms of our daily event-based fundraising and expectations for future pledges. Your donation will enable us to continue to support the more than 3 million Americans with IBD.
In these unprecedented times, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation recognizes that the IBD community is facing extraordinary challenges and has been experiencing a dramatically increased demand for education on COVID-19, as well as needs for expanded emotional support services. While these demands continue to evolve and change nearly daily, the Foundation has seen a significantly increased need for support as measured by:
• Foundation website traffic and downloads of our educational materials has increased five-fold • Calls received by the IBD Help Center about COVID have surged • The ‘townhalls’ and social media programs (Facebook Live, etc.) have dramatically increased participation – some by 1200% (yes that’s a real number!)
Your donation is now more important than ever, as it will enable us to continue offering our patients and caregivers education and support during this crucial time.
The Crohn's & Colitis Foundation also continues to invest in research that has the potential for major breakthroughs in IBD treatments. For example...
Precision Medicine: The overall goal of precision medicine is to tailor treatments based on specific clinical and biologic characteristics of individual patients to deliver optimal personalized care. In practice, this involves identification of biomarkers, which can be used to address the main research gaps: 1) understanding and predicting the natural history of IBD: disease susceptibility, activity, and behavior; 2) predicting disease course and treatment response; and 3) optimizing current and developing new molecular technologies.
Pragmatic Clinical Research: The main goal of pragmatic clinical research is to generate data that is relevant for making decisions in real-world clinical settings in order to deliver standardized optimal IBD care. Specifically, future studies should address the main research gaps in the following areas: 1) understanding the epidemiology of IBD, 2) accurate medication selection to increase treatment effectiveness, 3) defining how clinicians are utilizing therapeutic drug monitoring, 4) study of pain management, and 5) understanding the health economics and healthcare resources utilization.
The treatments that will result from these progressive research studies would not be possible without your support. Thank you on behalf of IBD patients everywhere.
Thank you,
Suzy