Objective: Evaluation of serum lactadherin level, its correlation with disease activity and certain biochemical parameters in IBD patients.
Methods: The study involved adult IBD patients, comprising 50 with ulcerative colitis (UC), 68 with Crohn’s disease (CD), and 29 healthy controls.
Results: The MFGE8 median concentration was significantly higher in UC versus controls (1914.54 vs. 1392.21; p = 0.017), but not in CD. The median MFGE8 levels in UC and CD patient groups didn’t significantly differ. There was a significant inverse correlation between MFGE8 and CRP (r = –0.283; p = 0.044) and fibrinogen (r = –0.362, p = 0.017) in UC. In active UC, MFGE8 median concentration was higher versus controls (1974.36 vs. 1392.21; p = 0.04) and negatively correlated with CRP (r = –0.482; p = 0.005), WBC (r = –0.391; p = 0.027), and fibrinogen (r = –0.473; p = 0.015). Inactive UC showed negative correlation only with fibrinogen (r = –0.567; p = 0.018). No correlations were found with disease activity measured using appropriate scales, age, BMI, or gender.
Conclusions: Active UC patients show higher MFGE8 levels. These increase inversely with inflamma-tory markers (CRP, WBC, fibrinogen) in active UC, but not in CD.

The aim of the study was to choose and validate the tool(s) to predict the number of hospitalized patients by testing three predictive algorithms: a linear regression model, Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) model, and Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model. The study used data from the collection of data on infl ammatory bowel diseases (IBD) from the public database of the National Health Fund for the years 2009–2017, data recalculation taking into account the population of provinces and the country in particular years, and prediction making for the number of patients who would require hospitalization in 2017. Th e anticipated numbers were compared with real data and percentage prediction errors were calculated. Results of prediction for 2017 indicated the number of hospitalizations for Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) at 17 and 16 respectively per 100,000 persons and 72 per 100,000 persons for all IBD cases. Th e actual outcomes were 21 for both CD and UC (81% and 75% accuracy of prediction, respectively), and 99 for all IBD cases (73% accuracy). The prediction results do not diff er signifi cantly from the actual outcome, this means that the prediction tool (in the form of a linear regression) actually gives good results. Our study showed that the newly developed tool may be used to predict with good enough accuracy the number of patients hospitalized due to IBD in order to organize appropriate therapeutic resources.