Curt Tysk

To assess whether dietary antigens play a role in inflammatory bowel disease, 26 monozygotic twin pairs with inflammatory bowel disease and 52 healthy controls were investigated for serum antibodies (IgA, IgG, IgM) against ovalbumin, betalactoglobulin, gliadin, whole yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and yeast cell wall mannan. The twins were made up of five pairs concordant and nine pairs discordant for Crohn's disease, and two pairs concordant and 10 pairs discordant for ulcerative ...

BACKGROUND: A familial defect in intestinal barrier function has been found in Crohn's disease.

AIM: To investigate possible genetic and environmental influences on this barrier defect by studying intestinal permeability in both relatives and spouses of patients with Crohn's disease.

SUBJECTS: The study included 39 patients with Crohn's disease, 34 healthy first degree relatives, and 22 spouses. Twenty nine healthy volunteers served as controls.

METHODS: Intestinal permeability was ...

BACKGROUND: A history of appendectomy is rare in patients with ulcerative colitis. This suggests a protective effect of appendectomy or that appendicitis and ulcerative colitis are alternative inflammatory responses. We sought to characterize this inverse relation further.

METHODS: We studied a cohort of 212,963 patients who underwent appendectomy before the age of 50 years between 1964 and 1993 and a cohort of matched controls who were identified from the Swedish Inpatient Register and ...

BACKGROUND: The Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ) is a disease-specific health-related quality of life (HRQOL) questionnaire including four dimensions and a sum score. The aim of this study was to assess the internal and external validity, reliability, and sensitivity of a Swedish version of the IBDQ.

METHODS: Three hundred consecutive patients with ulcerative colitis completed the IBDQ and three other health-related quality of life questionnaires (the Rating Form of IBD ...

By running the Swedish twin registry containing about 25,000 pairs of twins of the same sex together with the central national diagnosis register of hospital inpatients, 80 twin pairs suffering from inflammatory bowel disease were found. In the ulcerative colitis group one of 16 monozygotic pairs was concordant for the disease, but all the other 20 pairs (dizygotic or unknown zygosity) were discordant. In the Crohn's disease group eight of 18 monozygotic pairs and one of 26 dizygotic ...

CARD15/NOD2 encodes a protein involved in bacterial recognition by monocytes. Mutations in CARD15 have recently been found in patients with Crohn disease (CD), a chronic inflammatory condition of the digestive tract. Here, we report the mutational analyses of CARD15 in 453 patients with CD, including 166 sporadic and 287 familial cases, 159 patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), and 103 healthy control subjects. Of 67 sequence variations identified, 9 had an allele frequency >5% in ...

BACKGROUND: The long-term efficacy of infliximab as rescue therapy in steroid-refractory ulcerative colitis is not well described.

AIM: To examine the long-term efficacy of infliximab as a rescue therapy through a 3-year follow-up of a previous placebo-controlled trial of infliximab in acute steroid-refractory ulcerative colitis.

METHOD: In the original study, 45 patients were randomized to a single infusion of infliximab 5 mg/kg or placebo, and at 3 months, 7/24 patients given ...

OBJECTIVES: Crohn's disease (CD) is characterized by overproduction of proinflammatory cytokines like interleukin (IL)-1beta. Production of mature IL-1beta is dependent on a caspase-1-activating protein complex called the NALP3 inflammasome, composed of NALP3, ASC, and CARD8. NALP3 shares structural similarities with Nod2, and both of these proteins are required for bacteria-induced IL-1beta secretion. The combination of the polymorphisms CARD8 (C10X)and NALP3 (Q705K) was recently shown ...

Crohn's disease1,2 and ulcerative colitis, the two main types of chronic inflammatory bowel disease, are multifactorial conditions of unknown aetiology. A susceptibility locus for Crohn's disease has been mapped3 to chromosome 16. Here we have used a positional-cloning strategy, based on linkage analysis followed by linkage disequilibrium mapping, to identify three independent associations for Crohn's disease: a frameshift variant and two missense variants of NOD2, encoding a member of ...

Increasing evidence suggests that a combination of host genetics and the composition of the gut microbiota are important for development of Crohn's disease (CD). Our aim was to study identical twins with CD to determine microbial factors independent of host genetics. Fecal samples were studied from 10 monozygotic twin pairs with CD (discordant n=6 and concordant n=4) and 8 healthy twin pairs. DNA was extracted, 16S rRNA genes were PCR amplified and T-RFLP fingerprints generated using ...

BACKGROUND: Microscopic colitis (MC) is a chronic inflammatory bowel disorder of unknown aetiology comprising collagenous colitis (CC) and lymphocytic colitis (LC). Data on the local cytokine profile in MC is limited. This study investigated the T helper (Th) cell and cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) mucosal cytokine profile at messenger and protein levels in MC patients.

METHODS: Mucosal biopsies from CC (n=10), LC (n=5), and CC or LC patients in histopathological remission (CC-HR, n=4), ...

BACKGROUND: Cyclosporine (CsA) or infliximab (IFX) are used as rescue therapies in steroid-refractory, severe attacks of ulcerative colitis (UC). There are no data comparing the efficacy of these two alternatives.

METHODS: Outcome of rescue therapy was retrospectively studied in two cohorts of patients hospitalized due to steroid-refractory moderate to severe UC: 1) a Swedish-Danish cohort (n = 49) treated with a single infusion of IFX; 2) an Austrian cohort (n = 43) treated with ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: An increased occurrence of anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies (ASCA) is reported in unaffected members of families with Crohn's disease. Whether ASCA is a familial trait due to genetic factors or is caused by exposure to environmental factors is unknown. To assess the genetic influence of ASCA we studied its occurrence in a twin population.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: ASCA were analysed in 98 twin pairs with inflammatory bowel disease and were related to clinical ...

BACKGROUND: Microscopic colitis, including collagenous colitis and lymphocytic colitis, mainly affects middle aged and older subjects, with a female predominance in collagenous colitis. The diseases have previously been regarded as rare. We present an epidemiological study of microscopic colitis in a well defined Swedish population.

METHODS: Patients were retrospectively searched for in colonoscopy reports of those who had a colonoscopy in the period 1993-1998 for non-bloody diarrhoea. ...

BACKGROUND: Rescue therapy with infliximab (IFX) has been proven effective in a steroid-refractory attack of ulcerative colitis (UC). The long-term efficacy is not well described.

AIM: To present a retrospective study of IFX as rescue therapy in UC. Primary end points were colectomy-free survival at 3 and 12 months.

METHODS: In this multicentre study, 211 adult patients hospitalised between 1999 and 2010 received IFX 5 mg/kg as rescue therapy due to a steroid-refractory, ...