Crohn's disease/etiopathogenesis

The causes of Crohn's disease are not fully understood. Genetic predisposition likely interacts with lifestyle factors and environmental influences. According to UZIS data, 178 people per 100,000 inhabitants suffer from this disease in the Czech Republic. Compared to 2005, this is an increase of 51%. A group of French scientists  put forward a hypothesis that attributes the occurrence of the disease in developed countries to the increasing consumption of chilled foods. It is reported, for example, that of every 520 kg of food that the average French citizen consumes annually, 320 kg is food that has been preserved at low temperatures anywhere in the production chain. The hypothesis of the negative effect of chilled foods explains on the basis of the possible negative effect of psychrotrophic bacteria on health, such as Listeria monocytogenes, or some bacteria from the Yersinia genus , which occur and multiply precisely in refrigerated foods. According to some studies, the agent was also isolated from tissue lesions of affected patients. The hypothesis also relies on geographic and temporal considerations: the spread of home refrigerators in the US in the 1930s was followed by the rise of Crohn's disease in the 1940s in the US population; the spread of home refrigerators in Europe in the 1950s was followed by the rise of Crohn's disease 10 or more years later in the European population.

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 * 1) ↑ Hugot JP, Alberti C, Berrebi D et al.: Crohn's disease: the cold chain hypothesis. The Lancet 2003. vol. 362, pp. 2012-15. ISSN 1474-547X