School and School-Related Experiences of Children and Adolescents With Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Scoping Review.

The review did no quality appraisal or risk-of-bias assessment, so a weak study counts the same as a strong one. Nothing here has been checked for how well it was carried out. Only 10 studies were included and 7 of them were quantitative. Just one was qualitative, so most of what is reported about school life comes from questionnaires, parents or medical records rather than from the children themselves. The search covered only three databases (ERIC, Taylor & Francis and SAGE). Relevant medical literature indexed elsewhere may have been missed. One author screened all titles and abstracts alone; only the full-text inclusion decisions were checked by a second reviewer. The 10 studies came from eight countries with different school systems and used different measures, so the numbers reported (for example, absence rates) cannot be pooled or compared directly with each other. Samples ranged from 25 to 2827 children and ages from 3 to 18, and the two studies that reported socioeconomic status were exceptional. Only one study stated participants' ethnicity. Thirteen of the 23 full texts read were excluded, two of them because the full text was unavailable, so some relevant work may be missing.

The only funding named is a grant from the British Educational Research Association to one of the authors. The paper's funding and conflicts of interest statement names the British Educational Research Association as the funder. No competing interests were declared.

Do not read this as evidence that IBD damages academic achievement. Most of the included studies found no significant differences in educational outcomes, and some children achieved good marks while still struggling socially and emotionally at school. The review also appraised the quality of none of the ten studies, so it shows what has been studied rather than how strong that evidence is.