Somebody said...
How can we track down these mystery pathogens?
What we would like to do, hopefully with funding from NIH, is launch big, long-term programs. You would enter your baby into a trial the day he is born. We would have his genome decoded. We’d survey your microbiome [all the microorganisms in the body and their DNA] and maybe your husband’s microbiome, and all that would go in a database. Then we would come along and take a feces culture from your baby each month. And if ever he got a fever, we would swab his cheek and save that. We would do 10,000 kids like this. Then, in 20 years’ time, we would find that 30 of them developed colitis, and we would go back. If we could get all of that material out of the deep freeze and run it through the sequencing machine, we would find the answer. In the last 20 years, people have been so focused on linking disease with environmental factors like chemicals and pollution. But the environmental factor could be an infectious agent that you had in your body at some time in your life. Just because somebody ruled out an infectious cause in the 1980s or ’90s doesn’t mean this was correct. Technology has moved forward a long way.
That quote really stuck out at me. Would love to see how this turns out but unfortunately probably wouldn't have my colon by the time such a study was finished and its lessons applied to medicine.
That was a really interesting read. Can't help but compare all those surgeries removing the stomach to the situation those of us with IBD face now.
Another takeaway was that he mentioned the heavy resistance because of how big of an industry stomach ulcer treatment became, yet in the face of the truth, he eventually did get through to people. So it's not like a gigantic industry would be totally impervious in the face of a cure, but it does seem to show that they wouldn't just let all that go away.
I would think that this story is known by a lot of researchers who have tried to isolate a pathogen in IBD and the fact that it has been fruitless so far makes me think that at least in UC it likely isn't from a bacterium (unsure about
Crohn's though). The idea that some virus you got as a kid affecting you with UC years later is a little frightening though. I don't know how much it makes sense because it seems obvious that if colitis doesn't develop for another decade or two, there is some other additional trigger that sets things over the edge, imo.
Would really love to see that large scale study conducted however. Hopefully within my lifetime.