Pain-Free Living

Irritable Bowel Disease and Genetic Links

After a steady increase in irritable bowel disease (IBD) in African-Americans, a study recently published in the journal Gastroenterology reveals that similar genetic factors play a role in the development of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis in this population.

For more than a decade, teams led by Emory University, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Cedars-Sinai evaluated over 1,500 African-American people with IBD — 1,088 of whom had Crohn’s disease and 361 of whom had ulcerative colitis — and compared them with 1,797 African-Americans not affected by IBD. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis,  autoimmune diseases that cause the immune system to attack the intestines, affect approximately 1.6 million Americans.

One of the main goals of the study was to see if African-Americans and white Americans share the same IBD genetic risk factors, as well as which regions of the genome cause IBD in African Americans. The research showed that gene variants for the three most highly associated regions for Crohn’s disease and the foremost region for ulcerative colitis risk match in both white Americans and African-Americans. However, involvement of the Leishmania infection, a common trigger for IBD in white Americans, was not found in African-Americans, though they are more at risk for ulcerative colitis due to the African trypanosomiasis infection (which causes African sleeping sickness).

Read more about the study here.

 

 

Last Reviewed September 3, 2015

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