Progress made in understanding Crohn’s disease

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that is sometimes insufficiently controlled by immunosuppressive therapies with a subsequent need for surgical removal of affected bowel segments. By analysing draining mesenteric lymph nodes of affected small intestinal segments of patients who had required surgery, a research team led by Lukas Unger from MedUni Vienna identified immune responses that improve our understanding of the disease. The results of the study have just been published in the journal "Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology". Recent studies had investigated immune responses in mesenteric lymph nodes in models of ulcerative colitis, another chronic inflammatory bowel disease that exclusively affects the large intestine. The insufficient data available to date on Crohn's disease, which often manifests itself in the last section of the small intestine but spares the large intestine, forms the background to the research carried out by Lukas Unger and his team from MedUni Vienna's Department of General Surgery. The starting point was the question of why and against what Crohn's disease patients develop antibodies against many antigens that do not occur in healthy people. B-cell reactions investigated.