NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – In patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a fecal wash sample yields more information about histological inflammation than a biopsy sample, and may help inform diagnosis, disease monitoring and treatment selection, researchers say.
“Our lab reasoned that the cells that are shed from the gastrointestinal tract could carry information that would report on pathological processes in the gut,” Dr. Shalev Itzkovitz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, told Reuters Health by email. “We therefore sequenced the mRNA content (the host transcriptome) of fecal washes in inflamed IBD patients and in controls.”