Re: Re: Not sure this is going well...

[Guest guest]

Thanks for letting me vent! I had honestly thought I was protecting my family from the typical American diseases by being so careful with what I fed them. Obviously, it wasn't enough!Well don't beat yourself up about it - very possibly he had a genetic propensityfor it - in which case, he's lacking a peacekeeper protein in his intestinal wallthat is supposed to keep the pathogenic bacteria from penetrating the cell walls; and this breaching of the integrity of the intestinal wall is what causes the body to respond with the auto-immune response and the inflammation.So part of the bodies natural regulatory system is non functional. You could not have known this as the research for thisis brand new as of a few years back:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/84651.phpThe key abnormality is a deficiency of the T-bet protein in "dendritic" cells -- white blood cells that capture identifying antigens of foreign microbes and activate the immune defenses. T-bet, discovered in 2000 in Glimcher's laboratory, is a "master regulator gene," a transcription factor that orchestrates a pro-inflammatory response of the immune system. T-bet had been found to play a role in the body's handling of infectious microbes and cancer cells and has been implicated in rheumatoid arthritisand asthma, but the discovery of its pivotal part in the innate immune system in inflammatory bowel disease came as a total surprise. "We have identified a new molecular player, T-bet, and when it's missing, there is spontaneous onset of the disease in the mice," said Glimcher. "The importance of this study is that we now have a novel model for ulcerative colitis: The disease appears in 100 percent of the animals and looks just like the human disease." If some people develop ulcerative colitis because of T-bet DNA variation or polymorphisms, it may be because of an inherited variation in the DNA affecting the T-bet gene. The researchers are following up this lead. Here's the video:http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/multimedia/video/2007/LaurieGlimcher/Mara