Tobacco use in Crohn's disease patients and association with disease outcomes in the United States Medicaid population, 2010–2019

BACKGROUND AND AIM: To identify demographic factors associated with tobacco use in Crohn's disease (CD) patients in the US Medicaid population and examine how tobacco use affects disease outcomes. METHODS: We included Medicaid‐eligible patients who had ≥1 ICD code for CD, and 1 year of eligibility before and after the initial encounter. We used ICD codes to identify tobacco use with respect to the time of diagnosis and used logistic regression to identify the association between age, sex, and race with tobacco use at any point before diagnosis and after diagnosis, and determine the association of tobacco use before and after diagnosis on disease outcomes. RESULTS: We identified 98 176 eligible patients; 74.5% had no documented use of tobacco and 25.5% used tobacco at some point; 21.1% had used tobacco before their CD diagnosis and 11.8% had used tobacco after diagnosis. The population that used tobacco had a higher proportion of women, those who were White, non‐Hispanic, and those in their middle ages (21–60) than the group that did not use tobacco. Tobacco use before diagnosis resulted in higher risk of hospitalization and surgery (OR: 1.85 and 1.36, respectively). CONCLUSION: Within the CD Medicaid population, tobacco use is more common in women than men, which differs from the general population, which is possibly a result of using diagnostic codes rather than survey data. Smoking cessation efforts should especially be directed at younger people who are at risk for CD, due to increased risk for more adverse outcomes among those who use tobacco before diagnosis.