Healing the Gut: New Options for Crohn’s Disease
Researchers at Stanford Medicine in California may have discovered a way to help people with mild-to-moderate Crohn’s disease feel better with some dietary tweaks.
In a small study of 97 people, the researchers assigned 65 people a very low-calorie “diet akin to fasting. Sidhartha R. Sinha, M.D., an assistant professor of gastroenterology and hepatology, and his team divided the participants into a group who ate a plant-based diet between 700 and 1,110 calories over five days, once per month, for three months, compared to a group who didn’t change their diet.
A few of the participants reported headaches and tiredness during the low-calorie period. Men typically eat between 2,000 and 3,000 calories per day, so the side effects were to be expected. The results were promising. Two-thirds of the participants in the low-calorie group reported that their symptoms improved. Results were published in the Journal Nature.
“We were very pleasantly surprised that the majority of patients seemed to benefit from this diet,” Dr. Sinha said in a news release.
In addition, the researchers noticed an improvement in some of the common inflammatory markers in the blood and stool. “Our goal in collecting these and other biospecimens was to dig deeper into why there’s this differential response,” Dr. Sinha said. “Can we find mechanisms to explain the findings and signatures that might help predict patients who will respond to the diet?”
This autoimmune disorder affects nearly one million people in the United States. Crohn’s disease can run in families and account for approximately 20 percent of diagnoses. You can be diagnosed at any time, but it typically develops in your late teens to your early 30s. Fatigue, stomach cramps, bloody stool, and diarrhea are hallmarks of mild-to-moderate Crohn’s disease. Over time, people may also experience weight loss, iron deficiency, kidney stones, and inflammation of the skin, eyes, and joints, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can also affect sexual health, leading to erectile dysfunction (ED).
Although there’s no cure yet for Crohn’s, this small study shows promise in helping people cope with debilitating symptoms and improve their overall quality of life.