My immediate thought. People with those conditions literally spend their entire lives, or most of it, with their guts inflamed. It's only recently that they've come up with the biological medicines that can truly suppress it effectively for long periods of time.

You'd think they'd have spotted a noticable correlation by now if there was one.

[–] CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

I have crohns and it resulted in the loss of my entire colon. Every time someone talks to me about the disease, they have no respect for it because they don’t know what it is.

I was saved by modern medicine and am currently saved by it. And the advances that saved me are many. Those drugs you mentioned, surgical advances, dieting, all of it. If it weren’t for those, I would have died of organ failure my sophomore year of college.

So to your point, why would they not have spotted it or noticed? Well, I think that severe cases of crohns and UC used to just kill you. But nowadays the diseases are mostly studied under the same umbrella. Crohns and UC present different, but any inflammatory autoimmune disease is similar and could have similar causes. There’s also more info that we’re getting about the brain and gut relationship. So if I had to guess based on current info I’ve found on the diseases, it’s a diet problem.

I expect huge leaps to be made on autoimmune stuff, it could even be solvable through CRISPR.