Global Courant
The damage that intestinal inflammation can cause extends beyond the digestive system, even affecting the skin.
This is the conclusion reached by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and the key to this response lies in the gut microbiome. Changes in the microbiome have already been found to be associated with an increased risk of various diseases, such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
The study was published in Cell Reports, and the research team studied how ulcerative colitis, the chronic inflammation of the large intestine, can cause painful and persistent skin conditions that look like skin infections but do not actually contain skin pathogens.
“What we found is that factors associated with gut inflammation actually cause the skin to react to microbes it’s already used to,” says dermatologist Tiffany Scharschmidt, lead author of the study. According to her, the composition of bacteria on the skin has not changed. Instead, what changed was the skin’s immune response to them.
The immune system and the gut microbiome are inextricably linked, and disturbance of the latter can also lead to skin changes. This phenomenon occurs in a variety of conditions, including ulcerative colitis, which falls under the umbrella of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
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