A Link Between Food Poisoning and Crohn's

Another one I saw off of the About.com IBD blog (post). A recent study conducted in Denmark found a connection between certain types of food poisoning and increased rates of IBD.

Here is the excerpt:

Increased Risk of Inflammatory Bowel Disease After Salmonella or Campylobacter Gastroenteritis: A Population-Based Study (Abstract #80)

Researchers in Denmark have discovered a link between inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and an initial bacterial infection with either salmonella or campylobacter gastroenteritis, an important step in understanding the development of IBD that may help explain the increasing incidence of IBD over the past decade.

Denmark’s system of tracking its citizens with individual identification numbers allowed researchers to examine patient interaction with the health-care system over a 15 year period. Investigators examined how many patients in a control group would develop IBD and compared them with those who have been exposed to bacteria in the past. They found that over 15 years, three times as many patients who had been exposed to bacteria later developed IBD as those who had not been exposed.

“This is the first time we are able to make such a clear association with an initial exposure to bacteria and subsequent development of IBD in the long term,” said Nielsen Henrik, MD, professor of infectious diseases at Aalborg Hospital in Denmark. “Our research has important implications for food safety and disease prevention. If we can reduce and prevent the spread of food bacteria and infections, we may reduce or even largely eliminate IBD in the long term.”

Dr. Nielsen is hopeful that further research will go beyond the association between bacteria exposure and IBD established in his study and attempt to prove causality by studying in detail the biology of individual patients.

I find this very interesting as I was recently thinking about several severe bouts of food poisoning I had about 5 years before being diagnosed with Crohn's. Such episodes would no doubt have some impact on the microflora in your gut.

A possible link here could be that those severe bacterial infections caused dysbiosis or some other imbalance of bacteria in the gut - perhaps killing off some good bacteria that helped to regulate the immune response in the gut. Over time, the problem that was introduced at that point compounded (or at least makes you susceptible) to other bacteria or pathogens that cause of the problem.