Without context, a lot of things can be unclear. I’ve found that this principle holds especially true in the world of medical research. The research conducted by the Sheikh lab uses various biological samples, such as tissue, serum, individual cells. However, the one thing that binds all of these types of samples together is where they come from: a sick patient. Understanding the patient’s illness is just as important as understanding the sample that they provide us. So, on Tuesday afternoon, the entire Sheikh lab got together to hear Dr. Sheikh give a clinical talk briefly outlining the two main types of inflammatory bowel disease that the lab’s research is aimed towards.
Both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis have genetic, immunological and microbial factors that contribute to a given patient’s susceptibility; however, it usually takes an environmental factor to trigger a patient into actually contracting the disease. Essentially, there’s currently no way to predict if a person will get either disease because there’s no directly linked cause. Furthermore, it’s hard to pinpoint one of these diseases exactly in a diagnosis because the symptoms that patients have aren’t solely limited to the gastrointestinal tract. The elusive cause and the difficult diagnosis are just a couple of the reasons why the lab’s research on inflammatory bowel disease is so important.
So, you’re watching the season finale of the Bachelor and you’re about to find out who receives the final rose, and just like that the screen cuts to black and an image of blackened lungs fills the screen with bright red letters forming the blaring message “Smoking Kills”. We’ve all been there (more or less). Something really interesting that I learned in Dr. Sheikh’s talk was that for patients with ulcerative colitis, smoking has actually shown to have beneficial effects in fighting the disease. The nicotine in tobacco helps suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation, essentially countering the disease’s effects on the body head on. So for patients with UC, smoking doesn’t kill, it saves!