Blog

A Chance Meeting and Long-Distance BeginningsOur story began on a note of pure serendipity. Radhika and I met through a mutual friend in the summer of 2013. What’s astonishing to us both is that our friend had invited me to the event specifically to meet someone else...

Reviewed by Madhura Balasubramaniam, MA Medically reviewed by Drs. Manasi Agrawal, Ashwin Ananthakrishnan, and Parakkal Deepak In November, I had the privilege to listen to SAIA’s livestream discussion on Demystifying Environmental Triggers in IBD, a much-requested...

Looking back 20 years ago… When I first graduated college and started working, I had no idea what my life was going to look like. I was full of excitement but I did have a fear in the back of my mind that I may already have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in my early...

Happy National Coming Out Day to everyone, including those who are ‘out’ of the closet, those who are hoping to come out soon, those who are struggling with being in the closet, and our allies! Did you know that only about 14% of HCPs talk to their patients about...

Did you know? As of 2019, only 4.6% of U.S. medical students have disclosed some kind of disability to their medical school, which compares to the 25% of adults in the U.S. who have some form of disability according to the CDC. As an IBD patient advocate, my goal has...

Reviewed by Tina Aswani-Omprakash Our patient advocate team, SAIA's IBDesis, was honored to attend Digestive Disease Week (DDW) between May 4 – 6th, 2025, in San Diego, California. DDW 2025 allowed us to learn more about the latest research and developments in the GI...

Read the first part of Tanya’s Pregnancy Journey Living with Crohn’s Disease in India on SAIA’s blog: https://saia-gi.org/tanyas-pregnancy-journey-living-with-crohns-disease-in-india/ I put off writing this blog for the longest time… I did not know how to write it. In...

My name is Tanya, and I live in Chennai, India. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 1999, a time when little was known about IBD in India. This means that I have segments of intestinal narrowing and scarring throughout my small intestine known as strictures…

As IBD warriors, it’s always nerve-wracking to travel with our conditions and/or an ostomy. For me, it’s been 7 years of me traveling all over the U.S. and Europe for patient advocacy work. And even though I’ve spoken many times virtually for events in India and...

Reviewed by: Lea Ann Chen, MD At Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in Washington, D.C., I had the privilege of being involved as co-author on an abstract and presentation given by Dr. Lea Ann Chen, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, titled Unaffected Relatives...