Chrones Disease & Stress

I have often felt that how I feel in general can affect my Crohn's and like others I wonder if stress has an effect and even make the symptoms of Chrones disease worse?

As far as I have been able to ascertain there no hard evidence that stress can cause chrones disease in the fist place. However it is true to say that people who suffer with chrones do often experience the increased stress in their lives when compare to people without the disease. But this is mainly due to having to cope with a chronic illness.

I have seem some reports that suggest that people with Crohn’s disease have flare ups more often when they are going through a particularly stressful situation in their lives.

Based on this the best advice is that if you feel that there is a connection between your stress levels and a worsening of your chrones disease symptoms, try researching relaxation techniques like slow breathing exercises and possibly even meditation.

Also as always, make sure you eat well and correctly, get enough sleep and contact your doctor.

Nicotine, Smoking & Chrones Disease

The effects of Nicotine and Smoking on Chrones Disease

The general thought is that smoking cigarettes actually has a detrimental effect on Crohn's disease. The statistics show that people who smoke, or who have smoked in the past, have a bigger chance of developing Chrones than non-smokers. If you already have Crohn's disease and you smoke, you are more likely to have an increased number of relapses, repeat surgeries, and may require aggressive immunosuppressive treatment.

Most people with People Chrones disease are strongly encouraged by their doctors to stop smoking in order to prevent flare-ups of the disease.

Location of Chrones
A study conducted a few years ago and then published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, has shown that there is a link between smoking and Chrones Disease.

What the study seemed to show is that smoking may actually decide which part of your intestinal tract is affected in people who have Crohn's Disease.

The Importance of the Findings
The importance of these findings cannot be underestimated as where chrones disease is located in your body often determines if you will need surgical treatment or not.

The results suggested that crohn's disease seems to appear more often in the small intestine and not the colon in smokers. Chrones disease located in the small intestine is often more penetrating and thus causes more damage and as a result has to be treated with surgery more often.

More Information
Amazon.com have a number of articles related related to Smoking and Chrones available for download, including an article from Internal Medicine News by Bruce Jancin on how if you stop Smoking it helps to Cut Crohn's Surgery Repeats:
Smoking & Crohn's Disease

Ulcerative Colitis likely caused by Immune deficiency

At the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, Experiments being carried out on mice have identified an immune deficiency as the most likely cause of ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis is a severe inflammatory disease of the colon and is similar to Chrones Disease. For the differences between Chrones Disease and Ulcerative colitis, take a look at my post on Chrones Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are they different?

This research also demonstrated that once mice had Ulcerative colitis, it could then be passed from mother to their offspring and even between adult animals. They also linked ulcerative colitis in mice to a deficiency of a molecule in the immune system, which would normally prevent harmful bacteria in the large intestine from breaking the bowel's protective lining and thus allow the damaging inflammation. A shortage of a protein called T-bet which usually regulates the harmful bacteria. This then allows the bacterial attack on the intestinal wall. This then causes the inflammation we know as ulcerative colitis that's identified by the open sores throughout the colon.

It is hoped that better understanding of Ulcerative Colitis will also lead to a better understanding of Chrones Disease and one day a possible cure.

The details of this study is posted on-line in the journal Cell. www.cell.com

Cancer Drugs used to treat Chrones Disease

New cancer drugs could help regulate body's immune system and thus help fight Chrones disease according to some researchers in the US. Known as histone deacetylases inhibitors, or HDACs, the new cancer drugs might work extremely well in blocking the over active immune systems in people who have autoimmune diseases including chrones disease.

Wayne Hancock of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia says that this treatment for Crohn's disease would improve the immune systems ability to actually regulate itself and in the one study carried out on mice, the drug helped reverse and even prevent inflammatory bowel disease as well as prevented the rejection of heart transplants in other mice.

Up till now, the drug has mostly been used in studying cancer, but that could change and more tests could soon be done for diseases like Chrones disease.

Chrones Disease and Pregnancy

Because chrones disease often affects women of child-bearing age, I thought I would take a look at what the complications are of having Chrones disease whilst pregnant:

Risk of an early Birth
There have been some recent studies carried out at the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark by Dr. Bente Norgard and what they have shown that having an active chrones disease (a flare-up) during your pregnancy raises the risk of having a pre-term birth. This risk was shown to be three times higher in women with active chrones disease.

The researchers looked at the impact of chrones disease in 86 women with inactive Chrones disease during pregnancy (chrones in remission) and 71 women who had low to moderately high active chrones disease during their pregnancy.


What they also found is that women with the active chrones disease during their pregnancy, were shown the risks of giving birth to a child of low birth weight and congenital abnormalities were not increased, compared to the women with inactive chrones disease.

Overall the best advice is if you have crohn's disease and you are wanting to have a baby is to first get the disease under control and in remission. It is also important to work closely with your doctors who will be able to advise you and to point out the medications that you can and cannot take during the pregnancy.

SOURCE: American Journal of Gastroenterology, September 2007.

Newish Drug Could Help Chrones Disease Patients

Naltrexone in the past has been used to treat people who abuse drugs and alcohol, but now it could also be helping people with Chrones Disease. That is according to some recent research.

the research was conducted by Doctors in the USA and involved a small number of chrones patients, their findings found that some peoples symptoms of Chrons Disease actually went into remission when they took the drug (Naltrexone).

So what is Naltrexone?
Naltrexone is an opioid or narcotic antagonist and what it does is it blocks narcotics. The good news is that the drug Naltrexone has approval from the FDA to ease drug and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, and so because of this it could also be used to help people suffering with Chrones disease.

Dr. Smith who was working on the research commented: "We don't understand the mechanism of how it works in Crohn's disease, but there are opioid proteins on inflammatory cells, so by using Naltrexone it does reverse the inflammation and it also causes healing of the ulcers in the intestine"

The patients took one low-dose pill at bedtime and showed minimal side effects. There was about About 89 percent of patients showed some sort of improvement with Naltrexone and 67 percent had total remission of their symptoms. With these positive findings, the ideas is conduct larger scale studies which can only be good news for people suffering with Chrones Disease.

Amazon.com for the USA
Crohn's & Colitis Diet Guide: Includes 150 Recipes

Amazon.co.uk for the UK
Crohn's & Colitis Diet Guide: Includes 150 Recipes

Do Additives Cause Chrones Disease Problems ?

In Australia, some research has found that infant milk formula containing added fruit sugars could be the cause to some stomach disorders like Chrones disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis in children.

Apparently, some of the new children's milk formula, including big brands like Nutricia and Aptamil contain prebiotics which are supposed to improve the digestion such as fructose could actually be doing more harm that good. This is especially the case for children who may already be susceptible to diseases like Chrones disease.

A Gastroenterology expert, Prof Peter Gibson is concerned about the trend towards adding prebiotics to children's formula. He says that "Excessive intake of sugars that escape digestion and absorption in the small intestine contribute to susceptibility and symptom generation in Chrones disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis."

In the Western diet, The excessive intake of these sugars is common, This could possibly be one of the reasons why Chrones disease is so uncommon in places like Africa?

People with Chrones disease or IBS who remove these foods from their diet seem to get allot better. Prof Peter Gibson's team measured the prebiotic contents of food in the Australian diet in order to generate a nutritional database. The study found more than half of the 52 patients with Chrons disease who removed prebiotics from their food improved their symptoms. So it seems that prebiotics which provide good bacteria to maintain good digestive health but are likely to make Chrones disease and IBS symptoms worse.

Gene variant raises risk of Chrones disease

At a children's hospital in Philadelphia, Pediatric researchers in a have identified a gene variant that raises the risk of Chrones disease amongst Children.

Some German researchers had also previously found the same gene variant in the adult form of Chrones disease and this new research backs up their findings.

"Because Chrones disease is complex, with multiple genes interacting with each other and with environmental factors, it's important to sort out specific genes and to replicate previous findings," said the study's first author, Robert N. Baldassano, M.D., director of the Center for Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Children's Hospital. "There are different types of Chrones disease, so classifying types by genetic profiles may help us select the most appropriate treatments for each patient."

The comprehensive study compared the genomes of One hundred and forty three children with Chrones disease to genomes of 282 children who did not have the disease. In the results, they discovered that Sixty four percent of children with Crohn's disease had a specific variant form of the gene ATG16L1, compared with 52 percent of the healthy children. The odds ratio for children with the gene variant was 1.62 compared to control children, all this means that children who have the variant are 62 percent more likely to have Chrones disease than children with the more common form.

I guess the more studies done like this will all lead to more understanding of Chrones disease and hopefully lead to better treatments and possibly a cure one day.

It is better to get Chrones Disease in 2007 than in 1987

Affecting nearly 1 million people around the world, Chrones disease is a chronic inflammation of the bowel and intestines. People who have Chrones disease often have diarrhea and abdominal pain. About 80% of people with Chrones disease will also eventually will face some sort of surgery to remove damaged portions of bowel.

Having said all that, there is some good news, as the science finally catches up with chrones disease with modern treatments like anti-inflammatory medications called TNF blockers which have had very good results for many patients.

Two new chrones disease drugs are about to hit the market, so things could and should soon improve further for Crohn's disease patients.

In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee recommended approval of the drug called Tysabri as a medication for Chrones disease. Tysabri is already used for treating patients with multiple sclerosis. This recommendation will allow the FDA to move toward approval of Tysabri for Chrones.

The second new drug is called Cimzia, which was effective at treating about one-third of 1,330 patients with moderate to severe Chrones disease in testing. As well as this, 62% of the chrones patients who responded to Cimzia continued to benefit from the treatment after 6 months. The Belgian company who is developing Cimzia is planning to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee soon.

So there is hopefully some good news on the horizon for Chrones Disease sufferers.

Chrones Disease Diet

New Diet is said to help people with chrones disease and ulcerative colitis.

A new low carbohydrate diet has the potential to help people who suffer with Chrones disease and people with ulcerative colitis, the research has been carried out by Dr Richard Gearry who is a senior lecturer at Otago Universitys Christchurch School of Medicine in New Zealand.

Both Chrones disease and ulcerative colitis are forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

To ensure that the diet was low in carbohydrates, the 100 people who took part in the experiment had to reduce the amount of wheat, onions, milk, ice cream, apples, honey and stone fruits in their diet. It was also found that legumes could cause abdominal pain and diarrhoea in people who have chrones disease.

This research took place at Box Hill Hospital in Victoria in Australia and involved a hundred patients who have either chrones disease or ulcerative colitis. Patients followed the diet for six to eight weeks. The diet was also designed so that the taste was not too bad and that it was easy to follow. This was becaue they wanted as many people as possible to follow the diet for the full duration.

The results showed that some of the carbohydrates and sugars are not absorbed into the stomach and because of this they get into the colon where they ferment and produce gas which causes pain, these were presented to the Australian Gastroenterology Week conference in Perth.

The hope that it will go on to help many people who suffer with chrons disease and ulcerative colitis.