What causes ulcerative colitis?

Ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease, so the cause is unclear; something triggers the body to react to itself. Integrative gastroenterologist Robynne Chutkan, MD, discusses some theories of what may cause ulcerative colitis.

Transcript

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As children grow up in a society where there's less exposure to germs and infection, their immune system becomes more reactive

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and more likely to react to itself, and form antibodies, and create autoimmune disease.

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And that's a theory called he hygiene hypothesis. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease. And like most autoimmune diseases, we don't know what causes it, but there's

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something that's triggering the body to react to itself. There is a genetic predisposition. About 20% to 25% of the patients have a family history.

00:40

But it's not strictly a genetic disease. It's what we think of as familial because the majority of patients with ulcerative colitis

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actually don't have a family history. One of the interesting things about ulcerative colitis-- and it's true of other autoimmune diseases also--

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is that we're seeing an increase in incidence in the developing world as countries get more industrialized. One of the theories behind this is

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that as children grow up in a society where there's less exposure to germs and infection, their immune system becomes more reactive and more

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likely to react to itself, and form antibodies, and create autoimmune disease.

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And that's a theory called the hygiene hypothesis. Another theory is that alterations in gut bacteria because of overuse of antibiotics

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and exposure to too many toxins in the environment can affect the gut bacteria, and that that can be implicated in the inflammation that

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causes ulcerative colitis. So the truth is we really don't know what causes ulcerative colitis. But we hope that, when we discover the cause,

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we'll discover the cause not just for ulcerative colitis but for a whole host of other autoimmune diseases, like lupus, and diabetes, and MS,

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and several others that also involve the immune system becoming over-reactive and reacting to the body's own tissues.

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