European evidence based consensus for endoscopy in inflammatory bowel disease

Extract

1 Introduction

Endoscopy plays an essential role in the diagnosis, management, prognosis, and surveillance of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but surprisingly there are few available guidelines.^1,2 This prompted the ECCO Guidelines Committee (GuiCom) members to promote a Consensus on the appropriate indication and application of different endoscopic modalities in IBD. Since the development of guidelines is an expensive and time-consuming process, this Consensus may help to avoid duplication of effort in the future. It may also identify issues where the evidence is lacking and controlled studies are awaited.

The strategy to reach the Consensus involved five steps:

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In addition, ECCO has diligently maintained a disclosure policy of potential conflicts of interests (CoI). The conflict of interest declaration is based on a form used by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The CoI statement is not only stored at the ECCO Office and the editorial office of JCC but also open to public scrutiny on the ECCO website (https://www.ecco-ibd.eu/about-ecco/ecco-disclosures.html) providing a comprehensive overview of potential conflicts of interest of the consensus participants and guideline authors.