Cause of Ulcerative Colitis discovered?

Hi everyone, longtime lurker here (years), decided to finally sign up.
This was just posted on Science daily:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171221143041.htm

I think has been a working theory for many years, and I certainly have read many threads on this subject. People saying their issues started after a "bug". Now there's some actual significant scientific backing to it.

For me, my initial issues started with a stomach ailment that caused pain and nausea for a few days. Got better. But then soon after new lower symptoms began to develop over the ensuing weeks, spiralling into full blown colitis.

I wonder, if boosting IAE levels and Neuraminidase inhibition can prevent Colitis as said in article, could it also be used for remission maintenance or even treatment? Will be interesting to see what further research or trials come out of this.

Thoughts?

My UC also started after a series of food poisonings.

There might be one contradiction. Incidence of UC is higher in developed countries. In undeveloped countries there are low hygiene standards , so there should be higher incidence of common food poisoning infections. Thus there should be more cases of UC according to the suggested model.

Any idea?

I think there is more than one cause. No particular stomach bugs/food poisoning for me

Good memory Mark, I have a long thread on alkaline phosphatase.
As for the new article I am sure many of us had gut bug infections prior to UC, but
I might also guess that none ibd people also. Yes many have also said they think
they gut UC after a gut infection, so who knows. Did they also take antibiotics.
Interesting never the less.
Here it is.
Old Mike
/www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=38&m=3168506

Oligodar,

I was thinking about that as well, I've examined IBD, and in particular UC rates per Country, it's true that there's a strong correlation between developed countries and UC. (Also most other Autoimmune disorders). To complicate matters there's also a correlation with latitude, for example Canada has higher IBD rates per capita than the US. Same with Northern Europe vs Southern Europe.
Further north a person is the more they stay indoors most of the year during childhood (not out playing in the dirt, eating mud pies and priming a healthy immune system. On that topic, lab rats, like the ones used in this study, are also never exposed to the microbial natural environment, they are born in sterile environments.

To take it even further, the coldest parts of each country have even higher rates of IBD (and other Autoimmune) than the rest of the country, for example, Manitoba is the coldest of all the provinces of Canada, also has the highest rates of IBD, and most other Autoimmune, has the distinction of being the "MS capital of the world".

Studies confirm that our gut microbiota is determined in childhood and "locked in" after a certain age, unable to permanently change in adulthood.

Could that be the answer? That repeated mild salmonella exposure to people (or rats) with non-diversified gut microbes due to lack of environmental exposure in infancy or childhood (and corresponding awry gut immune response) lead to IBD? Perhaps that would explain why slum populations continuously exposed to foodborne illness such as salmonella don't get UC, because of their populous and diversified gut micrbiobe and resilient healthy immune response they acquired in their childhood?

Just my geuss speculation.


Also a quote from the article for people with no recollection of a salmonella type infection:

. "Food contamination at these low bacterial levels is likely to be more common than we recognize, while symptoms could be nonexistent or mild and disappear in a day or two without treatment. Repeated over time, we find that such minor infections are sufficient to trigger disease months and perhaps years later, depending upon the number and timing of infections an individual has experienced over his or her lifetime."

Interesting read thanks for sharing! Words like cure or cause often cause a little upset *shrug*. Let us hope that continued research like this points us more toward better treatments!

UCer23

From my understanding (I'm still a "student" at this) is that while a person's natural microbiota is "fixed" it can be temporarily modified via diet or exposure, for example the story of the person who went and lived for a while with a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, they had their microbiome analyzed and found it to have exotic strains of bacteria, however some time after returning a followup revealed their biome had returned to "normal".

This would indicate that FMT would have to be an ongoing treatment, it's complicated though because the donors biome might not be ideal to counter IBD processes, and a receiving patients immune response would be individualized, as everyone's biomes are different.
I would like to see FMT studies done where the "material" is flown in from hunter-gatherer donors, I would suspect completely different results.

And those people who grow up with continual bugs and live in less developed countries have absolutely no illnesses at all????

And there isn't c.diff or e.coli in developed countries? How do you know how many times your digestive tract has dealt with it in your lifetime Without having a full blown infection?

Oh wow! I need some of that fairy juice you're drinking.

q

It doesn't sound like the cause, it sounds like they found one possible trigger, and only for some people.

The hygiene stuff is tough for me to buy because I would imagine incidence in less developed countries may be partly reduced because of less ability to diagnose. Who is reporting cases of IBD in these places? who is getting diagnosed? Who has access to get a diagnosis? Like iPoop, I was outside in dirt growing up. I never had food poisoning until after I got UC actually.

From all the research I've done over the years, it seems that the vast majority of UC is brought on by either antibiotics or bacterial gut infection. The rates of IBD in the developed world are probably increasing because industrial farming is causing more contaminated food with stronger organisms that are antibiotic resistant. Even sub-clinical infections that don't tend to bother people can cause IBD because the organisms penetrate the gut barrier and cause immune sensitization. It's why even healthy people can suddenly get IBD now -- it's because the organisms are stronger, produce more powerful endotoxins, and are more invasive.

The rat models show us that rats born in a sterile environment and completely lacking gut bacteria do not develop IBD.

The medical establishment is tip-toeing around the fact that food contamination is the reason for the disease because to admit to this would be to open a huge can of worms on the whole pharmaceutical-food complex. There was always IBD but the rates have skyrocketed since the mid 20th century when the Green Revolution started and we all started eating nutrient deficient, antibiotic and chemical laden food. Now add super bugs to the picture and of course people's guts are eroding. And it's no secret that for many, the treatment or even the reason for their remission is a reversion to an organic, nutrient rich, whole food diet.

The developing world has lower rates than us because they are still largely relying on traditional food systems and agriculture that do not create any of these problems.

Post Edited (Connor77) : 12/25/2017 5:59:08 PM (GMT-7)

Interesting thought. Although for me, at least, my diet had actually become much, much healthier several years before my UC diagnosis. As my now DW had moved in with me several years before my diagnosis, and we then made all of our foods together from scratch using fresh veggies and meat. Before her, I ate lots of processed junk (tv dinners, frozen pizza, chicken fingers etc) lol. I continue to eat healthy in this way and UC symptoms are unmoved.

It's really puzzling to me. UC hit out of the blue. Unless this healthier diet change, and/or a stomach bug sonehow impacted my getting uc. Both proceeded diagnosis by quet a while. No chamge followed immediately by UC...

iPoop, didn't you mention earlier that you had a food borne illness a year before UC? What kind of pathogen was it -- did they find out?

notsosicklygirl -- I also grew up eating crap, which changed in adulthood. I was a vegetarian for 8 years from adolescence into my 20's. It seems that our constitutions are very much formed in the early years, especially before age 7. I saw my hospital records from age 2-3 and I had a couple of visits for food poisoning, one of which even had bloody stool! Although IBD did not set in until my late 20's, a nutrient poor diet in life was probably part of what brought me to where I am today. My family was middle class and we ate a lot of those pre-packaged luxury foods, sugary cereals, white bread, etc.

A lot of people say they were perfectly healthy before UC struck but it's doubtful. It's hard to qualify "health" just based on external factors. You may seemingly be doing everything right according to the latest health trends but internally there are subtle problems. That said, there are a lot of genuinely healthy people getting UC now, usually after gut infections, long-term gut erosion from bad food, or from antibiotics. Almost everyone in my social circles has problems with gluten now, for example. It's not just a trendy thing, people's GIs are getting weaker on a societal level.