A Pragmatic Clinical Trial in Adult Patients with IBD

Thirty-four adult IBD patients were recruited into a pragmatic open-label clinical trial.  A daily dose of 6 grams of N-acetylglucosamine were given orally for 4 weeks.  Self‑reported IBD symptom scores were assessed at baseline and after 4 weeks of treatment.

Overall, 88.1% (30 out of 34) patients reported N-acetyl-glucosamine helped with their IBD symptoms.  58.8% of patients reported improvement in abdominal pain with a 49% reduction in symptom score (P=0.00022).  64.7% of patients reported improvement in diarrhea with a 47% reduction in symptom score (P=0.0003).  Significant reductions in symptom score were also observed with nausea, passage of mucus, and rectal bleeding (effect size=41%-55%, all P<0.05). The medication was well tolerated and treatment response did not differ between genders.

There was no evidence of drug-drug interactions despite the fact that most patients were taking 3 or more prescription medication from a wide variety of drug classes and all patients were taking one or more over-the-counter medications.  N-acetylglucosamine is not a xenobiotic and is not metabolized by the cytochrome P450 system but acts as a building block for human macromolecules.

This pragmatic open-label clinical trial, in conjunction with previous animal and human data, demonstrated that N-acetyl-glucosamine is an efficacious adjunctive treatment for IBD.

Ref: Zhu 2015 Natural Medicine Journal April 2015 Vol 7 Issue 4.