What is Crohn's disease?
Crohns disease is not infectious and affects one in 1,500 people who are mainly adults. To some extent women are more affected than men.
Crohn's is a ongoing or chronic complaint that causes inflammation to any part of the digestive tract from the mouth to the anus. It is most common in the lower end of the small intestine (or ileum) or the first part of the large intestine. It regularly concerns more than one part of the bowel leaving normal, unaffected areas in-between.
The ailment is characterized by an abnormal response by the body's immune system which, it is believed, mistakes microbes and bacteria normally found in the guts for unfamiliar or invading material and commences an attack. These attacks increase blood flow to the lining of the intestine the wall of the bowel which makes it become swollen and inflamed. The defensive white blood cells then generate harmful products that eventually lead to ulcerations and bowel injury. When this happens, the patient experiences the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease.
Inflamatory bowel diseases have been described throughout history − Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), by Polish surgeon Antoni Leśniowski in 1904 and by Scottish physician T. Kennedy Dalziel in 1913. However it was an American gastroenterologist, Dr. Burrill Bernard Crohn, who described fourteen cases in 1932 and submitted then to the American Medical Association. Later that year, he, along with two collegues Dr. Leon Ginzburg and Dr. Gordon D. Oppenheimer, published a landmark paper entitled "Regional ileitis: a pathologic and clinical entity" which described the features of what is known today as Crohn's disease.
A related condition to Crohn's disease is ulcerative colitis and is the other main inflammatory bowel disease. Colitis and symptoms are similar to Chrohns and it can be difficult to distinguish ulcerative colitis from Crohn's disease when it mainly affects the lower sections of the bowel.