Crohn’s disease is a relapsing, chronic, systemic, transmural inflammatory condition that can involve the entire gastrointestinal tract. Symptoms can be very varied, even including fever, mouth sores, and inflammation in the joints, skin, eyes, bile ducts and liver. Ulcerative colitis, on the other hand, can be transmural in later stages, but tends to affect the mucosa only, leading to systemic symptoms such as rectal tenesmus, which is the sensation of incomplete evacuation of the bowel. Clinically, SBI has been shown to reduce many of the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea (IBD-D) previous to this study. Case studies have also been able to identify multiple benefits of SBI in drug-refractory IBS-D patients, including endoscopic remission, yet further exploration in human subjects is needed to confirm the types of benefits for the CD and UC patient population.
This study explored symptoms management in IBD patients over 12 weeks using a Likert scale and regression model following 5 grams SBI per day for nutritional support.
The odds ratio from the regression model demonstrated that the patients were 2.8 times more likely to report improvements in symptoms when taking the SBI (those improvements were not significantly related to gender, race or disease state). What’s more, the improvements increased steadily between weeks 1 and 12. Forty-nine percent of the cases reported a positive response to the therapy during the first week. By week 12, 76% had seen an improvement in their symptoms.
The scientists behind the study suggest that SBI should be considered for use in the nutritional support of IBD regardless of disease location, phenotype, duration, activity or complexity.