Add bowel disease to list of child problems

By David Steinkraus

Tuesday, November 4, 2003 8:42 AM CST

A study published in the October issue of Pediatrics found that Wisconsin has the world's highest rate of inflammatory bowel diseases in children, said Dr. Subra Kugathasan, leader of the team of physicians who did the study.

He is a pediatric gastroenterologist who practices at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and is a professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Yet there aren't many published studies to compare that result with, especially for North America, Kugathasan said. Physicians aren't required to report instances of the disease, unlike West Nile virus, for example, so there is no widespread tracking of the ailment, he said. "In Europe, because they have socialized medicine, this kind of analysis is possible. The data are available from England, Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia."

For the Pediatrics paper, Kugathasan and his colleagues gathered information from pediatric gastroenterologists in Wisconsin and from northern Illinois and eastern Minnesota, two areas where state residents may also seek treatment.

Inflammatory bowel disease is just what it sounds like - an inflammation of the intestines. The inflammation can be in the surface layers of the organs, as in ulcerative colitis, or deep in the tissue, as in Crohn's disease.

European data shows that the rates of these diseases are soaring in children, Kugathasan said. "The incidence of Crohn's disease in children has tripled - from 1960 to 1980, tripled, from 1980 to now 2000, tripled again," he said.

"There's no question about this increasing incidence of diabetes, obesity, asthma, and inflammatory bowel disease," he said.

Doctors speculate that all these are linked to problems with immune systems, he said, in particular what has become known as the hygiene hypothesis. This says that because we're living in such sanitary environments, our bodies' immune systems are not often challenged by germs and allergens.

Thus we build up little immunity as young children and are subject to allergies and immune system diseases later in life, or for our entire lives.

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