Case for IBD combination therapy comes from research at Baylor, MIT and Hebrew ...( Snowmass Co. (September 10 2004) - In...)

Snowmass, Co. (September 10, 2004) - Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, comprised of Crohn's Disease and ulcerative colitis, are for the most part incurable and their causes are still unknown. About 1 million Americans suffer from IBD and research around the world on new therapeutic strategies against IBD is being reported at a conference sponsored by the American Physiological Society.

On one thing most researchers agree on about IBD: it's very complex. And though it might seem obvious that treating a complex disease might take more than one agent, use of combination therapy hasn't been discussed much in relation to IBD.

Now separate groups working in Houston/Boston and Jerusalem have considered the implications of combination therapy in IBD. They are presenting their papers at the APS conference.

Intestinal Lactobacillus reuteri-based combination therapy directly modulates mucosal pro-inflammatory cytokine production in IL-10 deficient mice.

Probiotics and commensal bacteria represent likely sources for novel therapeutic strategies in inflammatory bowel diseases, and have become increasingly interesting to researchers. Indeed, some probiotic therapy agents are thought to be nearing the clinical trial stage. It is well-known that the human (and animal) gut is full of mostly beneficial bacteria. In IBD and other diseases researchers have taken an approach that reintroduces these positive bacteria, allow them to repopulate the gut and quite often they produce their own anti-inflammatory chemicals. One of the major such "bugs" is the genus Lactobacillus.

The research reported below was carried by James Versalovic and Jeremy Andrew Pena at the Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas, and by Arlin B. Rogers, Zhongming Ge and James G. Fox at the Division of Comparative Medicine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Probiotics have demonstrated efficacy in treating patients
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10-Sep-2004

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