Researchers from Rutgers and other institutions have uncovered significant variations in how inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) affects people of different races, sexes and places of birth.
The study, published in Gastro Hep Advances, may assist caregivers and help shed light on how diet, lifestyle and genetics can affect the development and disease course of IBD, a term for two conditions—Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis—that cause chronic inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract.
“IBD has historically been a disease of Caucasian populations in Europe and North America, but now we’re seeing it among all races and in people all over the globe, so it’s now important to study how it manifests in different groups,” said Lea Ann Chen, an assistant professor of medicine and pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and senior author of the study.
I’m gonna take a flyer here, but is there any correlation between the introduction of processed foods to a population and an uptick in IBD and the like?
I think that’s going to be difficult to determine because we also are much better at diagnosing these things now. My grandfather had colon cancer requiring a full ileostomy at age 50, and it was only in retrospect after sooooo many younger members of our family were diagnosed with Crohn’s that we realized his lifelong GI problems and young age colon cancer were probably a life of undiagnosed and untreated Crohn’s.
And the further complicating factor of the increasing numbers of young people getting colon cancer these days for reasons we still haven’t determined.
True, but we (the West) have a predilection for exporting our worst habits to the rest of the world, so it would not surprise me if there actually was one.
