Publications

Environmental factors influence the risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease and its subsequent course. In this study, the authors demonstrate that specific environmental factors, including fruit and vegetable consumption, smoking, and appendectomy, are associated with the initial phenotype, activity, and severity of inflammatory bowel disease. Moreover, this study provides guidance for personalised patient counseling regarding modifiable risk factors.

There is a need for validated biosignatures capable of predicting a future diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease. The authors of this text identified a blood protein signature that predicted Crohn’s disease as early as 16 years before its diagnosis and validated its high predictive capacity across multiple independent cohorts. The corresponding signature for preclinical ulcerative colitis had a lower, albeit significant, predictive ability.

The gut microbiome has been recognised as a key component in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), and the wide range of metabolites produced by gut bacteria are an important mechanism by which the human microbiome interacts with host immunity or host metabolism. High-throughput metabolomic profiling and novel computational approaches now allow for comprehensive assessment of thousands of metabolites in diverse biomaterials, including faecal samples. Several groups of metabolites, including short-chain fatty acids, tryptophan metabolites and bile acids, have been associated with IBD. In this Recent Advances article, the authors describe the contribution of metabolomics research to the field of IBD, with a focus on faecal metabolomics. They discuss the latest findings on the significance of these metabolites for IBD prognosis and therapeutic interventions and offer insights into the future directions of metabolomics research.

Nutrition has been acknowledged as crucial in IBD and is relevant to patients’ motives behind food choices, which are affected by health engagement (HE) and food involvement (FI). This study aimed to profile IBD patients according to their levels of health engagement and food involvement to identify patterns of different motives behind food choices, particularly regarding the use of food to regulate mood. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 890 Italian IBD patients who completed an online survey in April 2021. The authors measured health engagement, food involvement, motives behind food choices, emotional states, and food-related quality of life (Fr-QoL). K-means cluster analysis was performed to identify participants with similar levels of health engagement and food involvement. Four clusters were identified: “Health-conscious (high HE, low FI)”, “Balanced (high HE, high FI)”, “Hedonist (high FI, low HE)”, and “Careless (low FI, low HE)”. Clusters with high FI are inclined toward seeking pleasurable food, but when supported with high health engagement, individuals were less prone to use food to manage mood. Groups with higher health engagement demonstrated lower hospitalisation rates and relapses and better Fr-QoL. Profiling IBD patients regarding FI and HE could aid clinicians in identifying individuals at greater risk of maladaptive food-related behaviours.

Disrupted host-microbe interactions at the mucosal level are key to the pathophysiology of IBD. This study aimed to comprehensively examine crosstalk between mucosal gene expression and microbiota in patients with IBD. To study tissue-specific interactions, we perform transcriptomic (RNA-seq) and microbial (16S-rRNA-seq) profiling of 697 intestinal biopsies (645 derived from 335 patients with IBD and 52 from 16 non-IBD controls).

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. A comprehensive overview of an IBD-specific antibody epitope repertoire is, however, lacking. Using high-throughput phage-display immunoprecipitation sequencing (PhIP-Seq), the authors of this paper identified antibodies against 344,000 antimicrobial, immune, and food antigens in 497 individuals with IBD compared with 1,326 controls.