Folic Acid in Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Status unconfirmed · Phase 4

Conditions studied: Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

In brief

Inflammatory bowel disease often requires immunomodulators, such as methotrexate, to maintain disease remission. This medication is administered as one dose weekly. Methotrexate can cause folic acid deficiency, so the current recommendation is to give daily folic acid supplementation while on methotrexate. Standard of care is to administer folic acid supplements daily. Patient compliance with daily folic acid is often suboptimal. The rationale is that weekly folic acid supplementation is as efficacious as daily dosing, and less frequent dosing likely will help improve patient compliance. The optimal dosing schedule of folate supplementation in relation to methotrexate is not known and there are not many research studies that have studied changing dosing of folate supplementation. One particular research study examined the effect of different dosing of folic acid supplements in patients with rheumatoid arthritis taking methotrexate. The study showed that folic acid at two different doses per week (5 mg low dose vs 27.5 mg high dose) did not effect the efficacy of methotrexate therapy, and patients who were on either folic acid supplementation had lower toxicity scores compared to patients not on folic acid supplementation. This study shows that folic acid dosed once per week can be useful in preventing methotrexate toxicity for rheumatoid arthritis patients. There were no studies that could be found that have studied this correlation for pediatric inflammatory bowel disease. Based on this current study, once weekly dosing of folic acid in IBD patients on methotrexate has the potential to be as efficacious as daily dosing.

Key facts

Study ID
NCT03860012
Run by
Le Bonheur Children's Hospital
People needed
100
Starts
2018-09-11
Expected to finish
2020-05-01
Last updated by the study team
2019-03-01

Who can join

Age: 2 and older, up to 21. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: not accepted.

You may qualify if…

You may not qualify if…

Where it is running

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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