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University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
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Editor’s note: Evaluating the activity of a relapsing–remitting condition such as ulcerative colitis (UC) is necessary in everyday clinical practice, and having a standardized measure is essential in clinical studies. While many activity indices are already in use, there are insufficient rigorous comparisons of their performance. Furthermore, most of these indices rely on sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy, which are sometimes impractical in the routine clinic, and are also relatively unacceptable in the pediatric context. For this reason, the current article describes a systematic effort to devise an entirely non-invasive scale of disease activity for pediatric UC, to correlate it with other measures, and to determine its ability to discriminate clinically meaningful alterations in disease activity.