Welcome
My son is also 14 soon to be 15 and was diagnosed at 10. When he was first dx'd we did the prednisone and Imuran (sister drug to 6MP) route and while it worked for the most part he did not grow or gain weight on it and we now suspect that he had simmering inflammation going on in his small intestine and have discovered that his blood labs do not reflect what is going on inside him.
Dusty is right after a couple of years when we begin to suspect the Imuran was just not enough and my son had tried methotrexate and had a reaction and we didn't feel he was at the point where a biologic was justified his GI much to my surprise suggested trying LDN it is usually something you have to fight for as there has only been a couple of small studies and one of those involving pediatrics and it is not approved for Crohn's and so is used off label and needs to be compounded.
We did have some success on it and I believe he reached a solid remission for the first time, he grew and felt great, scopes were clean, fecal calprotectin was a 90 (anything 160 and under was considered normal), He did not gain weight however he was just never hungry (I suspect it was a side effect of LDN) once we added supplemental nutrition he gained weight fast so we do think that the LDN worked.
It takes a long time to truly get to that remission stage though they say 3 months but if you read LDN stories it really is 6-8 months although you start to feel better at about 3 months. My son was hit with a c-diff infection over the summer which threw him into a flare and a blast of prednisone, 8 weeks of EEN and finally adding Imuran along with the LDN was not enough to bring him out of it. The LDN might have worked again we just did not have the 6-8 months to wait.
He started remicade in January and is feeling absolutely fantastic and growing and gaining weight.
I hope he is able to go back to LDN some day but for now he is doing better then he ever has and when he is doing growing and developing we will look at it again.
You have to make those medicine choices you are comfortable with and in the best interest of your child. I think I and my son's GI needed to make the journey through the different meds to accept that yes he needed the biologics as his symptoms and overall outlook, it was easy to say "he's not that bad, he doesn't need biologics"
