A new study gives ammunition to researchers who claim that Crohn's disease, an often devastating inflammation of the intestine is caused by a microbe usually infects cattle. But the study, published in this week's issue of The Lancet , it is unlikely to end the long debate on the role of the microbe.
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammation of the small intestine, which can cause severe pain, diarrhea, ulcers and tissue damage which sometimes requires surgery. For over 15 years, some researchers have blamed Mycobacterium avium subspecies JD , a bacterium that causes severe intestinal infection called Johne or Johne's disease in cattle, goats and sheep worldwide. Infected animals lose bacteria in their milk, and some studies have shown that the pasteurization does not kill all the microbes. Contaminated drinking water may be another route of infection. The same Mycobacterium species was found in the tissue of the intestine of patients of some Crohn; proponents of the hypothesis believe that only people with a certain genetic or immunological predisposition getting the disease.
thereFour years, Saleh Naser of the University of Central Florida in Orlando and colleagues cultured breast milk of two women with Crohn bug - a finding that they say provides further evidence that the Crohn's disease is really the human equivalent of Johne's disease. In the new document, Naser and his colleagues show that half of the 28 Crohn's patients had bacteria in the blood, while not one of the 15 people who had bowel diseases unrelated or were healthy did.
It is not known why the bacteria have shown in the blood of patients with certain Crohn's disease, but not in others. However, "this is a very important piece of the puzzle," says researcher Robert Greenstein Crohn's Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New York, a proponent of the hypothesis of infection. Finding microbes in the blood, which is normally sterile, "is an indication that the immune system loses the battle" in patients with Crohn's, he said. in an accompanying editorial in the Lancet , Warwick Selby, University of Sydney , Australia, cautions that the study does not clinch the case. Even if he writes, "the sight of all that, [ Mycobacterium ] can not continue to be ignored in Crohn's disease. "
Related Sites
More Crohn disease
website awareness and paratuberculosis Research Association, with links to the literature scientific
0 Komentar