Defining gene-lifestyle interactions in inflammatory bowel disease: progress towards understanding disease pathogenesis

Recently, Lopes et al quantified the effect of modifiable lifestyle factors in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) prevention using population attributable risk, and reported that 42.9% of Crohn’s disease (CD) cases and 44.4% of ulcerative colitis (UC) cases could have been prevented by lifestyle interventions. This interesting result was based on 6 prospective cohorts including 3 US cohorts with 208 070 participants and 3 large European cohorts that were used for validation.1 Undoubtedly, this well-performed study illustrates the possible merits of lifestyle modification as a prevention strategy for IBD. However, we would like to argue that lifestyle modification as such cannot be uncoupled from the genetic background. Although the importance of genetic susceptibility in the development of IBD is widely accepted,2 this was unfortunately not assessed in Lopes et al ‘s study. We recently conducted a prospective cohort study on the UK Biobank in >450 000 individuals,...

Source: Gut - April 5, 2024 Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Zhao, J., Chen, J., Sun, Y., Yuan, S., Wellens, J., Kalla, R., Theodoratou, E., Li, X., Satsangi, J. Tags: Gut PostScript Source Type: research