‘These conditions typically affect young people at a time when they are trying to finish their education and have relationships and hold jobs down, and can be devastating,’ said Dr James Lee, a gastroenterologist.‘These conditions typically affect young people at a time when they are trying to finish their education and have relationships and hold jobs down, and can be devastating,’ said Dr James Lee, a gastroenterologist.
“These conditions typically affect young people at a time when they are trying to finish their education and have relationships and hold jobs down, and they can be devastating,” said Dr James Lee, a gastroenterologist at the Crick Institute in London, who led the research. “Part of the reason we did this study is because there are a proportion of people who already have quite established damage to the bowel at the time of diagnosis.
Because this sort of damage takes time to accumulate, researchers have long-suspected that there must be a pre-clinical phase to the disease, where damage is occurring but people aren’t experiencing symptoms – raising the possibility that such changes might be detectable in the blood. “This tells us that the origins of these diseases are happening much earlier than we ever thought they were, which could give us a huge window of opportunity to intervene with lifestyle modifications or getting people on to effective treatment much, much earlier. We hope that we could then avoid people needing to go straight for a big operation at the time of diagnosis,” Lee said.