Linda “Annie” Feagins, M.D.

Linda (Annie) Feagins, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School and the director of the Center for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases at UT Health Austin.

Feagins’ primary clinical interest is caring for patients with inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. To improve care for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), she has been active nationally, serving on several National Scientific Advisory Committees for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, sitting on the FDA Related Matters Committee for the American College of Gastroenterology and spotlighting the latest research by serving on the Digestive Disease Week Abstract Selection Committee for the American Gastroenterological Association. Feagins is excited to bring her expertise and passion for caring for patients with Crohn’s and colitis to Austin to help build a gastroenterology program at Dell Med and to create an IBD center to serve central Texas.

A native Texan, Feagins grew up in Houston and obtained her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University. She then returned home to attend medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston before moving to Dallas, where she trained in both internal medicine and gastroenterology prior to joining the faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the Dallas VA. Feagins came to Austin from UT Southwestern, where she was an associate professor in the Department of Medicine. She was also the director of the IBD program at the VA North Texas from 2008 until 2019.

Feagins’ research interests are two-fold. First, she studies ways to prevent complications during colonoscopy and has focused on post-polypectomy bleeding, a known complication of colonoscopy. Early on, she had grant funding from a VA VISN 17 grant to study the risk of post-polypectomy bleeding in veterans on thienopyridines. With this funding, she performed a prospective trial and published the first prospective estimates of the rates of bleeding if polypectomy is performed with uninterrupted use of thienopyridines. Most recently, she completed a large multi-center MERIT-funded trial investigating the role of prophylactic hemoclips to prevent delayed bleeding, which was published in Gastroenterology. She found that hemoclips did not reduce the risk of bleeding when placed after removal of polyps 1 c.m. in size or larger.

Feagins’ other area of research interest is improving care for patients with IBD. She has spearheaded various projects including predicting the risk of flare up for patients with IBD using histology and biomarkers (such as epithelial tight junction proteins), better understanding the onset and course of IBD in older patients, predictors of early discontinuation of anti-TNF agents in veterans, sexual health in men with IBD and the effects of radiation for prostate cancer in men with IBD.