Tag Archives: transition

Navigating Celiac Disease: Tips for Pediatric to Adult Transition

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L Kievela et al. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology,2025; 23: 908 – 911. Transition of Care in Celiac Disease: A Chance to Advance

This clinical practice article offers some useful advice in transitioning patients with Celiac disease into adult provider care. Some of their recommendations for adult provider care:

  • Regular visits
  • Assessment of gluten-free diet adherence with low thresholf for dietician referral
  • Checking serum tissue transglutaminase antibody levels
  • Screening for other autoimmune conditions
  • Consider additional lab tests (eg. CMP, CBC, Ferritin, ALT, Albumin, Folate, Zinc, Vit D, Vit B12, and TSH) and DEXA scan based on clinical situation
  • Recommend screening family members
  • Check vaccination status
Figure 1 provides suggestions for a transition report

Related information that is not in the article:

College/school resources:

Suboptimal Transitions: Pediatric to Adult Care

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Two recent articles delve into the topic of Pediatric to Adult Care Transition.

M Katz et al. J Pediatr (Epub head of publication) 2021. African American Pediatric Liver Transplant Recipients Have an Increased Risk of Death After Transferring to Adult Healthcare (Thanks to a friend who shared this reference & congratulations to my Emory colleagues and senior author Nitika Gupta on this publication)

This retrospective study examined 101 patients between 1990 and 2015. 64 had long-term followup data available.

Key findings:

  • African Americans had higher rates of death after transfer than patients of other races (44% mor-
    tality vs 16%, representing 67% of all cases of death; P = .032)
  • 18 of the 64 (28%) died. Of those 18 deaths, 4 (22%) occurred within the first 2 years after transfer, and 10 (55%)
    within 5 years of transfer.
  • There was a high rate of medication nonadherence in patients who died. ” Death in our cohort was typically caused by chronic rejection and graft failure, with a high frequency of severe infections or bleeding events ultimately causing a patient to die.”
  • The average age of transplant in deceased patients was 15. Transplantation in teenage years could be a risk factor as well.
  • The authors note that “the years directly after transfer of care from pediatrics to adult medicine are high risk for death and poor patient outcomes. Racial disparities seen in pediatric medicine also hold true after transfer to adulthood.”

H Pearlstein et al. JPGN 2021; 72: 563-568. Predicting Suboptimal Transitions in Adolescents with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

This retrospective study with 104 subjects defined suboptimal transition as “either a return to pediatric care or requiring care escalation within 1 year of transfer.

Key findings:

  • 37 (36%) were determined to have a suboptimal transition.
  • Risk factors: mental health diagnosis (OR 4.15), medication non-adherence (OR 5.15), public insurance (OR 6.60), and higher Physician Global Assessment score at time of transition (OR 6.64).

Comments: This is a small study and included only 26 patients receiving public insurance, which the authors considered as a proxy measure of socioeconomic status.

My take: These studies show the difficulties and potential deadly outcomes that face these young adults during transition from pediatrics to adult care. In many cases, medication non-adherence is a key factor and can be affected by access to care, insurance coverage, and mental health. Most young adults with serious medical problems probably would benefit from keeping their parents actively involved in their care.

Related blog posts:

March 30,2021. Washington D.C. Thanks to Seth for this picture.

Better Discharge Planning Needed

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An interesting commentary in NY Times: Most Dangerous Time at the Hospital? May be When You Leave

An excerpt:

One-fifth of Medicare beneficiaries are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, and one-third are readmitted within 90 days. One studyfound that 20 percent of patients have a complication within three weeks of leaving the hospital — more than half of which could have been prevented or ameliorated. Thankfully most complications are minor, but some can be serious, leading to permanent disability or death. All told, Medicare spends $26 billion annually on readmissions, $17 billion of which is for readmissions that are considered preventable…

there’s often a rush toward the end of hospitalization — when a patient wants to leave or a rehab bed opens up — leading to a haphazard set of final conversations, appointments and prescriptions. And because the exact time of discharge is uncertain, the doctor discharging a patient may not be the one who knows the patient best.

It’s also often not clear exactly when a patient should be discharged….

the remaining diagnostics and treatments are often completed after discharge. But this is where we struggle most. Research suggests direct communication between hospital doctors and primary care doctorsoccurs infrequently and that discharge summaries — detailed records of a patient’s hospital course — are often unavailable at a patient’s first post-hospital visit. Almost 30 percent of patients are discharged with a plan to continue workups after hospitalization, but more than one-third of these are never completed. Similarly, more than 40 percent of patients have lab tests pending at the time of discharge — with 10 percent requiring action—but most physicians remain unaware of them.

My take: This is indeed an area where checklists and attention should be focused.  My top three:

  • Making sure a list of discharged medications is compared to admission medications
  • Identifying outstanding tests and arranging followup workup
  • Direct communication with outpatient physician(s)

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