Discussion
The results show that, among the evaluated patients, there was a prevalence of female gender, patients married or in a stable relation, with full elementary education, nonsmokers, with no family history of IBD, and with a higher occurrence of CD – findings that agree with the literature.14–17 The data ofthe present study were similar to those found by Rosa, Silva Junior and Rosa14 who, in a study with 48 patients in whom 66% were female, 66% were married, with a mean of 12.38 years of schooling, 85% non-smokers, and 81% with no family history of IBD. Our data also agree with those from Souza, Belasco, and Aguilar-Nascimento18 that, among their 220 patients studied, 57% were women, 66% were married, with a mean of 9.17 years of schooling and 62% of non-smokers. Studies show that although there is no distinction between genders for disease involvement, the higher occurrence among women may be due to hormonal factors, which may interfere with the expression of the disease, or else due to the progress in the technologies and methods for detecting the diseases and in the establishment of diagnoses, taking into account that women are more concerned about their health.17,19 As for vitamin D, in the present study, most of the patients presented deficiency (63%), which agrees with the findings of Ulitsky et al.20 that, when evaluating 504 patients with IBD (403 with CD and 101 with CNUC), found vitamin D deficiency in 49.8% of the participants. Our data also combine with the findings of Levin et al.,21 who reported 38% of deficiency in a study with 78 participants.
