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Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Industrialization Essay

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Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a chronic and relapsing gastrointestinal condition currently affecting a total of about 28 million people worldwide (cite). Although it is not considered a fatal condition, painful and disabling symptoms can have a profound detrimental effect on patients’ quality of life. Current understandings behind the etiology of IBD emphasize genetic predispositions to gastrointestinal immune system imbalances. However, pathophysiological understandings of IBD seem to be limited as explanatory tools given the distribution of IBD cases in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. Therefore, this paper will provide an overview of the biological aspect of IBD alongside significant environmental drivers of the …show more content…

Yet, IBD is much less prevalent in the Jewish population of Israel, which depicts how IBD manifests for reasons beyond genetics. Accordingly, it is important to remember that both genes and lifestyle are inherited from our parents.
In general, an infection, which provokes an inflammatory state in people with and without IBD, may cause every individual to have temporary GI inflammation and stir up symptoms of abdominal pain and diarrhea. Following the acute infection, most individuals reset their immune system and return to the previous state of controlled, low level inflammation. Individuals with various genetic abnormalities for IBD however, demonstrate an overly aggressive T-cell response wherein the immune system fails to reset itself and the colon does not return to its previous healthy state. Instead, there is a chronic inflammatory state, with a persistent imbalance between the factors that increase the body’s immune response and those that limit it. The onset and reactivation of disease are triggered by environmental factors that transiently break the mucosal barrier, stimulate immune responses or alter the balance between beneficial and pathogenic enteric bacteria.

Both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis patients have high levels of CD4+ T lymphocytes in their mucosa. CD4+

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