We are conducting a medical research study to look at the causes of inflammatory bowel disease. This large study, based in Brisbane, Queensland, is the first population-based, case-control study of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in Australia.
What is IBD?
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a group of diseases that includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It affects up to one in every 200 Australians or a total of 100,000 people in this country.
IBD is a medical condition that affects the gastrointestinal system, or gut. People with this illness often have ongoing symptoms of tummy pain, diarrhoea, the passing of blood, and weight loss. They can also suffer from other conditions that affect the skin, eyes and joints. Patients need medication for long periods of time and many have bowel surgery. IBD affects both males and females, including children.
IBD is a separate condition from the more common functional bowel disorder known as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).Why is the research needed?
There is still a lot that we don’t know about IBD. The causes remain unclear, and as a result, no prevention or cure is yet available. Patients suffer from this disease for the rest of their lives.
It does seem that Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis may be inherited, so to understand why this occurs we need to look for genetic differences between people who have IBD and people who do not. A number of environmental factors, like smoking and diet, may also play a part in disease development, or influence whether a patient has mild or severe disease.
We aim to discover whether people’s genes or inherited features could partly cause IBD. We also want to see if there is a link between IBD and lifestyle, or if things in the environment around us might trigger IBD. By identifying these risk factors, we may be able to discover what causes this disease and what measures may decrease the risk of people developing IBD.How common is IBD in Australia?
Research from other developed countries around the world has shown that IBD (including Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and indeterminate colitis) is becoming much more common. Some population-based studies have reported that the number of new Crohn's disease cases has almost doubled over the last 20 years.
The recent increase of IBD in patients less than 19 years of age and in migrant communities, along with a reduction in the frequency of IBD seen in the relatives of IBD patients, strongly suggest that environmental factors are likely to be very important in determining the cause of these diseases.
Whether this also applies to Australia however is unknown. With no population-based data available and only hospital-based figures to go on, Australia is considered to be a country with a relatively low number of people with IBD. This has important implications for the future provision of services and allocation of funding for research into these chronic, debilitating illnesses.
Accurate information on the prevalence and incidence of IBD also gives us important clues into the potential causes of these conditions. That is why it is so important that studies like this one collect data to calculate how common IBD is in the Australian population.
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