Episode 026 - Finding Treatments for IBD

December 28, 2023 James McIlroy

In episode 26 of the Inside Matters podcast, we dive deep into the evolution of IBD treatments with Dr Richard Hansen and Prof Konstantinos Gerasimidis.

The following is a conversation with Professor Konstantinos Yerasmididis, a professor in clinical nutrition at the University of Glasgow, who has a special interest in the gut microbiome and dietary interventions to treat disease. We also had Dr Richard Hansen, consultant paediatric gastroenterologist, who was on episode number one of the podcast.

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This is the first time I had two guests participating in the Inside Matters podcast at the same time. It was an absolute pleasure. Given that Costas and Richard are experts in inflammatory bowel disease and that they've collaborated on several different research initiatives, we spent a lot of time talking about inflammatory bowel disease.

We spoke about their work which is focused on using nutrition and personalized dietary therapy in the context of Crohn's disease in particular. So they've been involved in a program called CD-TREAT where they've tried to mimic the effects of something called exclusive internal nutrition, essentially an entirely liquid diet with a diet that contained real food.

Why is that important?

Well, for four out of five children with newly diagnosed Crohn's disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease, this exclusively liquid diet has a profound impact on Crohn's disease. So four out of five of them go into what we call remission. i. e. no clinical symptoms.

However, there are challenges associated with EEN. Most notably, it's very restrictive. You can't eat any food for six to eight weeks. So what Costas and Richard have been trying to do is, can we give children and potentially even adults a diet that contains the same components? as a liquid diet. It allows people to eat real food without having to have an exclusively liquid diet.

We also talked about some common myths and misconceptions associated with the microbiome. We asked the question, does the microbiota cause obesity? We also spoke about the microbiome field more generally and how it's progressed over time. and some of the challenges that both the field and the academic researchers have faced over the last decade.

This is a really interesting conversation that I think should be accessible to most of the listeners. We did go quite deep on some areas but we always brought it back to well, what does that mean for the listener and what can a listener take away from it?

I believe that you will particularly enjoy this podcast if you're someone with inflammatory bowel disease or if you know somebody suffering from inflammatory bowel disease. You will also enjoy this podcast if you're interested in diet, nutrition, and how the diet interplays with the microbiome and how the microbiome interplays with the rest of the body.

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