Posts by Bharati D. Kochar, MD, MSCR
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PPI, H2RA Use by Older Adults Not Associated With Dementia or Cognitive Impairment
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers examined data from a well-characterized multinational, prospective cohort of 18,934 older adults and found no relationship between use of acid suppressors and incident dementia, cognitive impairment, baseline cognitive function test scores, or change in test scores over time.
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Frailty Assessment May Be Useful for Risk Stratification of Older Adults With IBD
Bharati Kochar, MD, MS, and colleagues have demonstrated that among older adults with new-onset inflammatory bowel disease, a higher risk of frailty is associated with a three-fold higher risk of all-cause mortality and two-fold higher risk of all-cause hospitalization, even after accounting for comorbidities.
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Medicare Data Suggest Vedolizumab Safe, Effective in Older Adults with IBD
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers have found that older adults with inflammatory bowel disease who initiate vedolizumab have a lower risk of infection-related hospitalization than those initiating a tumor necrosis factor inhibitor.
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Patients with IBD at Higher Risk of Meningitis
Independent of immunosuppressive treatment, rates of meningitis are higher in adults with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than in a non-IBD population, according to a nationally representative U.S. study conducted by Bharati Kochar, MD, MSCR, and colleagues.
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Very Few Older Adults Are Included in Trials of IBD Medications
Only 0.9% of patients in recent randomized, controlled trials of medications for inflammatory bowel disease were ≥65 years old, and for trials of biologic agents, the figure was 0.5%, Massachusetts General Hospital researchers determined based on the first systematic review of this issue.
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Immunosuppressive Therapy for IBD Not Linked to Increased Risk of COVID-19
Kristen E. Burke, MD, MPH, Bharati Kochar, MD and Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan, MD, MPH, of the Crohn's and Colitis Center, and colleagues collected reassuring data that patients with inflammatory bowel disease can continue using immunosuppressive medication during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Age-related Disparity in Participation of Video-based Telehealth
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers found that during the first surge of COVID-19, adults 60 and older were significantly less likely than younger patients to have video-based telehealth visits and significantly more likely to have telephone visits.
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Frailty Is a Risk Factor for Immunosuppression-related Infection in Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Independent of age and comorbidities, pretreatment frailty doubled the risk of infection in the first year after immunosuppressive therapy in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
Biography
Bharati Kochar, MD, MSCR, attended college and medical school at Brown University as part of the Program in Liberal Medical Education. She completed her residency in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She then pursued a fellowship in gastroenterology at the University of North Carolina (UNC), where she also obtained advanced training in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and completed a master’s of science in clinical research at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her clinical area of interest is the management of IBD in medically complicated adults. She received a career development award from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation to study the pharmacoepidemiology of IBD in older adults. She is an active member of the IBD subcommittee of the AGA Quality Measures Committee.
Digestive Healthcare at Mass General
The Massachusetts General Hospital Digestive Healthcare Center is a collaborative practice of gastroenterologists, endoscopists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, hepatologists, oncologists and radiation oncologists dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and management of digestive diseases.