A research team consisting of 40 doctors specializing in gastroenterology at the University of Leuven in Belgium identified a biological mechanism behind irritable bowel syndrome, and confirmed that new evidence confirms that this syndrome is a real disease that must be dealt with in this light.
According to a newspaper report sciencealert Scientific, clinical studies have suggested that intestinal infection from pathogens such as Escherichia coli and salmonella can increase the likelihood of someone developing irritable bowel syndrome, and patients often describe their symptoms that begin after a case of food poisoning, and this gave researchers an intuition, so they infected test rats. With bacteria that cause food poisoning, while also feeding them a protein found in the eggs (oval albumin). Once the mice recovered from the infection, feeding them oval albumin alone activated intestinal immune cells, whereas these cells did not interact with the control mice that were given oval albumin but not Bacteria.
Egg protein has now been recognized as an antigen (foreign invading substance) by the immune system of non-dominant mice. Usually, our immune system disregards parts of the proteins (which our immune system can recognize as antigens), a process called oral tolerance but apparently That when the immune system activates in response to an infection, it also learns to see the food present at that time as a threat as well, which produces antibodies to recognize and remember these antigens..
When the antibodies hit the antigen again (in this case the egg protein), they catch it and bind to mast cells, which leads to the release of these immune cells to release histamine and their inflammatory processes.
It is known that histamine makes nerve cells more sensitive, which explains the abdominal pain even when only the intestinal tissues expand within normal limits while digesting food..
Then Aguilera Lizaraga and colleagues tested 12 IBS patients and 8 healthy people to see if their intestines reacted in the same way as mice. It is certain that injecting known foods like soy milk and cow’s milk into the intestinal wall of IBS patients caused a similar immune response. But not in healthy volunteers, in both mice and humans, the immune response was limited to the intestine, specifically to the colon of mice, where the bacterial infection occurred, which clearly distinguishes this food intolerance from food allergies, such as gluten sensitivity, which causes the immune system to activate at the level of the body..
A gastroenterologist at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the study, told a journal Science: “The idea that you could have a specific allergic response occurring in the gut is a really new concept“.
While this study is only small, previous clinical trials have shown that antihistamine therapy can improve symptoms of IBS, and researchers are now exploring whether stress-induced irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) has the same basic mechanisms, and more work is currently being done on the use of antihistamines. Histamine to treat IBS.
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