Children with newly diagnosed cases of inflammatory bowel disease have higher concentrations of folate in their blood than individuals without IBD, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a term that refers to both ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD). IBD occurs most frequently in people in their late teens and twenties. There have been cases in children as young as two years old and in older adults in their seventies and eighties; men and women have an equal chance of getting the disease.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin investigated whether Vitamin D deficiency in patients with IBD is associated with a lower quality of life or higher disease activity independent of other known risk factors and medication use.

Scientists report online this week in Nature that they have linked the health of specialized gut immune cells to a gene associated with Crohn's disease, an often debilitating and increasingly prevalent inflammatory bowel disorder.

Researchers have discovered two new genes that increase the risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in childhood.

An international consortium of Crohn's disease researchers has combined data from three independent studies to identify 21 new genetic variants associated with the inflammatory bowel disorder, bringing the total number of risk factors to 32.

New research has trebled the number of genetic regions known to be implicated in Crohn's disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease, to over thirty.

Hospitals with higher annual volumes of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) who undergo surgery have lower in-hospital mortality rates than hospitals with lower volumes of IBD patients, according to a new study by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Scientists search for drug candidates in some very unlikely places. Not only do they churn out synthetic compounds in industrial-scale laboratories, but they also scour coral reefs and scrape tree bark in the hope of stumbling upon an unsuspecting molecule that just might turn into next year’s big block buster.

In polarized Caco-2 cells, cholesterol was depleted by a combination of synthesis inhibition and plasma membrane extraction with complexing agents. This led to an increased sorting of CEA to the basolateral surface. Interestingly, polarity was not significantly affected by this approach. The association of CEA to lipid rafts, cholesterol, and sphingolipid-enriched microdomains was inhibited in parallel.

What is believed to be the largest study of its kind for the genetic roots of inflammatory bowel diseases has suggested new links to Crohn’s Disease as well as further evidence that some people of Jewish descent are more likely to develop it.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic recurrent gastrointestinal disease. The disease has a relatively higher morbidity in young adults, in whom growth, education, employment and wellbeing all are adversely influenced. A number of guidelines for management of inflammatory bowel disease are available for bringing evidence-based medicine into full play to improve IBD patient care.