Researchers from America, Britain, Sweden and Germany found that maintaining a healthy lifestyle may help prevent 60% of inflammatory bowel diseases.
The international study, published online in the journal Gut and reported on by York Alert, found that adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle may prevent up to 60 percent of cases of inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
The results prompted the researchers in this study to suggest that lifestyle change may be a possible option for future preventive strategies, especially for people who are more susceptible to inflammatory bowel diseases, taking into account the need for more research on this matter.
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) affects an estimated 3 million people in the United States and 1.3 million in Europe, and diagnosed cases are increasing, particularly in newly industrialized countries.
Lifestyle
Previously published research has linked IBD risk to several lifestyle factors, but it wasn’t clear whether adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle might reduce the risk of developing the condition in the first place.
To find out, the researchers in this study relied on participants’ data from the Nurses’ Health Study One and Two (NHS) and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS) in America. These studies are among the most distinguished among epidemiological studies. long term.
The first Nurses’ Health Study recorded data on 121,700 nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 years from 11 US states in 1976, while in the second study, which was conducted in 1989, 116,429 nurses (aged between 25 and 42) from 15 states were monitored. American.
In contrast, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study included 51,529 physicians between the ages of 40 and 75 from across the United States in 1986.
The researchers created an adjustable risk score (MRS) for each participant based on specific modifiable risk factors for IBD to estimate the proportion of cases that could have been avoided. The modifiable risk ranged from 0 to 6, with higher scores indicating severe risk. Larger.
Risk factors included weight (body mass index), smoking, use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), physical activity, and daily consumption of fruits, fibre, vegetables, polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and red meat.
The researchers put together the proportion of cases that could be avoided if an overall healthy lifestyle was adopted and maintained. Each participant was assigned scores from 0 to 9, with higher scores indicating a healthier lifestyle.
A healthy lifestyle consists of the following:
- A body mass index between 18.5 and 25
- Non-smoking
- Doing physical activity for a period of not less than 7.5 hours per week
- Consuming at least 8 daily servings of fruits and vegetables (one serving of fruit equals one medium-sized fruit, and one serving of vegetables equals half a cup cooked or one cup fresh)
- Consuming less than half of the daily ration of red meat (a serving of meat equals 80 grams)
- Consuming at least 25 grams of fiber per day with at least two weekly servings of fish (a serving of fish equals 140 grams)
- Eat at least half of your daily serving of nuts.
During the observation period, 346 cases of Crohn’s disease and 456 cases of ulcerative colitis were reported.
Based on the results of the adjustable risk scores, the researchers estimated that having lower risk scores could have prevented 43% of Crohn’s disease and 44.5% of ulcerative colitis cases, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle could prevent 61% of Crohn’s disease cases and 42% of cases. % of ulcerative colitis cases.
The development of inflammatory bowel disease
To validate their findings, the researchers applied the scoring system to data from 3 large European studies: the Swedish Radiography cohort (37,275 participants), the Swedish men’s cohort (40,810 participants), and the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (404,000 participants). and 144 participants).
The researchers acknowledge that the average age at which IBD was diagnosed was older than usual, and early lifestyle factors that may have an impact, such as breastfeeding, having antibiotic prescriptions, stress, and environmental factors such as pollution, were not considered, in addition to to social and economic factors.
“The main assumption of our findings is that the relationship between lifestyle factors and the development of IBD is causal,” the researchers wrote. “Although this has not yet been proven, many pieces of evidence support the critical role of environmental and lifestyle factors in the development of IBD.”
They added, “Lifestyle modification may be an attractive goal for future prevention strategies for IBD, and this matter may also be closely related to groups most at risk of developing the disease, such as first-degree relatives of patients with IBD, whose risk of developing the disease is estimated at between 2 and 17% during their lifetime.
Inflammatory bowel disease
According to the Mayo Clinic, inflammatory bowel disease is a term for disorders that involve persistent (chronic) tissue inflammation in the gut, including:
- Ulcerative colitis, which includes inflammation and sores along the lining of the large intestine (colon) and rectum.
- Crohn’s disease, which is characterized by inflammation of the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, often involving the deep layers of it, and the small intestine is considered the most affected by the disease.
Symptoms of IBD:
- diarrhea
- exhaustion
- Pain and painful cramps in the abdomen
- blood in the stool
- Anorexia
- Unintentional weight loss.