Look Into the Future: Early Gene for IBS Identified!

Apparently, parents will be able in the near future (hopefully) to know if their children have the risk to develop an irritable bowel syndrome and cure it before it starts becoming a real pain! Just imagine how much would this scientific breakthrough help our kids!

It was a study of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis in children that identified a gene that influences whether children get these diseases early in life, and therefore points to a potential new target for treatment. The findings of the international team that performed the study were published online this week by the journal Nature Genetics.

While several genes that influence susceptibility to the two diseases have been found previously, this study is the first to focus on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) with childhood onset.

Both genetics and the environment have an effect on the risk of getting inflammatory bowel disease – that’s a fact everybody knows. For example, if one identical twin suffers from Crohn's disease, the other has a 60 percent probability of getting it too. However, the incidence of disease has drastically increased over the last half century, because the environment has changed, as well as the way people lead their life today. So, please try to understand: we are doing it to ourselves and we have to stop. Because, the way it is now, the future does not look nice…

Anyway… back to the study and its IBS/ulcerative colitis findings: it compared the DNA of more than 1,000 children diagnosed with all sorts of inflammatory bowel diseases at the average age of 11 with 4,250 disease-free children, and confirmed the findings in a larger set of patients established by the British Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium - the authors used gene chip microarray technology to scan thousands of one-letter alternative genetic "spellings" spread throughout the patients' DNA. Most of these made little difference when it came to affecting the risk of inflammatory bowel disease, but a few stood out, and two had not been seen before. Just imagine how important! Because scientists were led to a gene whose activity they found was associated with the degree of inflammation in the colon. And there is encoded a protein that lengthens the duration of an immune response by regulating the longevity of activated white blood cells, meaning that it could be the answer for our problems! Let’s just hope that the doctors and scientists and researchers are able to create a good medicine to help our kids in the future. Although IBS could certainly be controlled in a more natural way: by living a healthy life!