Today this disease affects approximately 500,000 in the United States alone and is the second most common form of inflammatory bowel disease after ulcerative colitis. In fact, these two diseases are often very hard to distinguish from each other due to the fact that both tend to affect the same areas of the gut through similar means.

The most common form of IBD in the United States is Ulcerative Colitis, which affects roughly 1 million people. Thankfully, very few people actually die of the condition today, but what may be worse is that a large number of these people have a severely diminished quality of life.