We read with great interest the original contribution by Ananthakrishnan et al. on the effect of infection-related hospitalizations in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases on mortality, hospital stay and hospital charges.1 The authors conclude fittingly that infections account for significant morbidity and mortality in these patients and identify several risk factors of infectious events.We congratulate the authors for addressing this important topic, and laud their efforts to identify important patient characteristics, namely age and Elixhauser co-morbidity score,2 that are strongly correlated with infections in hospitalized IBD patients. Nonetheless, we would like to highlight two points that merit further discussion.
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