Christine Kwong

What we did was we

We took all of the published literature and all of the other previous studies and tried to analyze them as one body of work to try and really pick out what are consistent signals because there's a lot of, you know, this marker is up in these studies, but this marker is down.

So we were trying to really pick out clear, consistent markers that are consistent

associated with IBS over people that are healthy, but also people with other gastrointestinal conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

And what we found was that there is a consistent signature in the peripheral blood in that there are some inflammatory markers that are higher in patients with IBS compared to the

healthy people.

And then there are also differences between IBS patients and patients with those more what we refer to as organic gastrointestinal conditions, but inflammatory bowel disease or celiac disease, for example.

Oh, absolutely.

So that's a really great question.

It's hard to say because again, there's so much heterogeneity that it potentially could go both ways, but it is likely that the IBS is potentially for whatever reason, whatever's causing the IBS, whatever's that initial trigger of the IBS is causing the body to respond in an inflammatory manner, which is then, you know, those signatures are then remain within the blood and the circulation and are, you

predictable there but it's also again further complicated because we know that while you know about half of people with IBS have what we call a gut to brain driven disorder where the IBS seems to initiate in the gut itself the other half seem to have more of a brain to gut pathway and

where there's some kind of like the psychological or brain factors may actually drive the gut dysfunction.

So there's another layer of complexity in actually unraveling that and it's really hard to know.

And I guess the third aspect to consider here is that we also know that somewhere between 10 to 20% of IBS cases actually start after

like a gastro infection, if you like.

And so we refer to them as post-infectious.

And in that scenario, it's potentially that inflammatory scenario exists before the IBS develops.

Yeah, yeah.

So fecal calprotectin is really important in terms of monitoring and diagnosing inflammatory bowel disease, as you said.

And people being investigated for IBS, if they haven't already had things like inflammatory bowel disease ruled out, will actually have calprotectin measured.