inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)

See the following -

Remembrance of Things Past -- Bacterial Memory of Gut Inflammation

Press Release | Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University | May 29, 2017

The microbiome, or the collections of microorganisms present in the body, is known to affect human health and disease and researchers are thinking about new ways to use them as next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics. Today bacteria from the normal microbiome are already being used in their modified or attenuated form in probiotics and cancer therapy. Scientists exploit the microorganisms' natural ability to sense and respond to environmental- and disease-related stimuli and the ease of engineering new functions into them. This is particularly beneficial in chronic inflammatory diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that remain difficult to monitor non-invasively...

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What Does the Environment Have to Do with Diseases That Affect the Immune System?

Lindsey Konkel | Ensia | January 4, 2016

In 1932, New York gastroenterologist Burrill Crohn described an unusual disease in 14 adults. The patients had bouts of abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, and lesions and scars on the bowel wall. Doctors in other parts of North America and Europe were seeing it in their patients, too. They called the rare condition Crohn’s disease. After World War II, the number of new people getting inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s disease and a related condition called ulcerative colitis) skyrocketed across the West in countries such as the U.S., Canada and the UK. In the last three decades, IBD has begun to crop up in newly industrialized parts of the world like Hong Kong and China’s big cities...

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