Following is the into to a good article on the state of the art in IBD; link at the bottom;
"In the last decade there have been enormous strides in our understanding of the role of gut microbiota in the aetiopathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Newer molecular and genetic diagnostic tools have elucidated distinct changes in the gut microbiota in IBD patients and clarified the deficiencies of innate immunity. A link between environmental factors like diet, host immunity and the gut microbiota has been established. This review aims to enumerate these diverse strands of converging research in the last decade to outline the exciting prospects of possible personalized therapeutic interventions for patients with IBD in the coming years."
"INTRODUCTION Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) comprises two distinct conditions, ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD) that are characterized by chronic relapsing inflammation of the gut in genetically susceptible individuals exposed to defined environmental risk factors[1,2]. IBD was historically considered to be a “Western” disease but in the last decade there has been a definite increase in its incidence and prevalence suggesting that it is progressively emerging as a global epidemic[3]. In the high prevalence regions the incidence of IBD has continued to rise in the past decade[4,5].
There has been a parallel rise in our understanding of the critical role of the gut microbiota in the aetiopathogenesis of IBD. This is aptly exemplified by entering the key words, “microbiota” or “microflora” and “inflammatory bowel disease” into the PubMed database. On restricting the search to the last 10 years, over 800 articles published on this subject can be retrieved as opposed to 100 articles in the decade preceding it. This radical explosion of interest has been primarily due to the advent of culture-independent techniques like next generation sequencing and metagenomics which has enabled the global assessment of the gut microbiota much more accurately and in a vastly more sophisticated manner[6,7]. The largest and perhaps the most ambitious initiative that has emerged in the last decade is the NIH sponsored Human Microbiome Project with a total budget of $115 million to study the changes of the human microbiome in health and disease[8]. It has recently led to the publication of 5177 microbial taxonomic profiles from a population of 242 healthy adults sampled at 15 or 18 body sites up to three times, with over 3.5 terabases of metagenomic sequence so far, which will serve as a comprehensive framework for future research in this field[9]."
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