Today, more than 56 000 patients in Finland (with 2500 new cases per year) are diagnosed with the chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), Ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. The IBD patient numbers in Europe and North America are reaching 4 million. These cases are now rising at a worrying speed here at home especially in youth, and overall in the developing countries.
How do we as individuals and the clinicians then know if something serious is going on in the gut, or, if we are in an unusually stressful or exciting period with “butterflies in the stomach”? Nevertheless, the increasing prevalence of various gut disorders requires a major attention from both the healthcare and research communities.
To differentiate between the many gut ailments, robust, specific, easy to perform and preferably inexpensive and non-invasive biomarkers are needed. Disease modeling and defining the cellular and molecular biology behind the diseases, are necessary to understand disease development and to identify better biomarkers.
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