Breakthrough in Cause of IBD

Sounds interesting.  They keep saying that part of the problem is that we are too clean.  I wonder how many on this forum remember being raised in an overly clean home?  Now I know that my mother was, and still is obsessed with clorox and boiling hot water but I also remember getting free salt from a steet vendor and licking it off my filthy hand as a small boy etc..  I also remember that my first being aware that I was using a lot more toilet paper than normal people was at age fifteen while working on a dairy farm with all the dirt involved with that.  I was not a kid who worried much about washing his hands before grabbing a sandwich or picking my nostrils.  So was my lack of exposure to "dirt" detrimental when I was too small to go out on my own?  Is dirt exposure too late at age four and up?  Did the country dirt set off my ibd since I had grown up with city dirt and had not been exposed to it before?  I have a lot of allergies and hay fever.  Working on the dairy probably gave me my heaviest exposure to allergens I have ever had.  Since allergic reactions are similar to what the paper above proposes is the cause of Crohn's, could this constant exposure to hay, horses and cows and dogs and pollen have triggered my crohn's?   Does this strike a note with anybody with their own first symptoms of ibd?

I am suspicious of some other possibilities like the chemical they line tin cans with? 

What do you all think?

My mother kept a clean house, but she wasn't ridiculous about it. I crawled on the floor, played in the mud and kissed the dog.

Maybe they're talking about the relative lack of parasites in the more "developed" countries?

Nicely said keeper. I wonder if I encountered a pathogen (MikeB) on that dairy farm that I never encountered in the city and it started the process. I may have had problems before that But I sure don't recall them. I have a terrible memory though. The more I think about it though, that was when it started.

Post Edited (FunGuy) : 12/20/2009 6:54:48 PM (GMT-7)

I don't think my childhood was overly clean. I heard I ate crickets as a baby. lol... However, I've always had allergies so it wouldn't surprise me if my immune system reacted to food as well even though I have never tested positive for foods in standard allergy tests. It is a good theory but they really didn't have a true study with it to back the theory up.

Well...Mom would not have liked me saying this, but my house was not spotless growing up. I am the youngest of her 7 kids and grew up pretty much handling things myself after age 5. I played in a radioactive creek from the time I was a baby, played trucks with my brothers in the dirt, dug carrots in the garden. My bedroom was always a mess. So I did not grow up too antiseptically (boy I am so much cleaner now). I had symptoms back to around kindergarten age so I can't tell you what difference may have triggered me---I never left my neighborhood until age 12 except for a trip to NJ at 1 and annual trips into Ontario CA. I lived the same life as my sister (except she did not get to play in the creek as much). She is 10 years older than me and her CD signs were not apparent until her 20s.
So if environment plays a part...why did mine show up sooner, my sis later and my other sis (between our ages) not at all??? I am sure that this article has oversimplified the thought process for my family.

My daughter not only played in the dirt and dirty sandbox, but also was diagnosed with pinworms twice when she was between the ages of 4 and 6 - probably from the park's sandbox. 

I grew up all over (California, Germany, etc.), and I was always outside in the dirt. Once we moved back to Tennessee my siblings and I were always outside playing on my Aunt's farm. My mother is a neat freak, but she definitely believed in a healthy amount of exposure to germs.

I'm still of the mind that my immune system is over-active, however. I've been sick once in the past 4-5 years, and that was only because my University was going through a widespread swine flu outbreak. Even then, I was only sick for less than a week and back on my feet as good as new afterward.

I'm sure this theory could account for some cases though! I don't believe we all get this disease in exactly the same way as far as external environment goes. I do believe that our genes count for quite a bit though. It just really depends, as always with Crohn's.

Thank you for posting this though! It's definitely interesting.