Christine Kwong

And so there's real opportunity here to kind of change that clinical practice where if it is slightly elevated and we would have to kind of redefine the cutoffs where we would consider, you know, a normal F-cal versus an IBS calprotectin versus an organic disease.

But yeah, there is absolutely opportunity here to kind of improve the diagnostic process by considering fecal calprotectin, which, you know, it's just a stool sample.

It's not invasive.

It's routinely done

But it can be costly, it can cost $70 because it's not always funded.

But I mean, the evidence does suggest that it does have benefit and it could save, you know, potentially other costly tests if you can take out.

I mean, if you're undergoing diagnosis for IBS, you've potentially had a whole bunch of procedures done, including colonoscopy, including blood tests, including stool tests for parasites and so on that are also costly.

Yes, I guess there could be an argument made there for looking into this further to kind of reduce some of that economic burden.

Yeah, so there's absolutely still a way to go for there to be impact in terms of IBS diagnosis.

I mean, one limitation is that these markers such as IL-6 are quite, not generic, but they're inflammatory markers that are associated with a number of conditions and physiological states.

So they're not...

specific to IBS per se.

I guess the real, you know, right now impact of this work is that it really provides validation that IBS is often being considered what we call a functional disorder where there's no biological basis.

And for patients

that can be quite disheartening.

I mean, you think about having this really huge symptom burden that disrupts your every day.

There's significant quality of life impacts of having IBS.

And to then be told that there's nothing biologically wrong with you is quite invalidating and quite stressful.

And so I think the real point, the today impact of this work is that it does show that there are immune system changes happening

that we can detect, that we can measure, that show that IBS patients are different to healthy controls.