[wellthissucks]

I was at Books a Million today and casually flipping through psychology and health books seeing if anything about IBS was mentioned, and in one of them about anxiety, IBS had a small mention. It said that recently that they've found that people with IBS seem to have a mutated gene that people without IBS don't have...and it also said something about the gene being linked to anxiety as well. Anyway, I'd never heard this before and was wondering if anyone knew any more details about this?

 

[Kathleen M.]

Probably talking about this studyhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17040410 There are some links to other papers on this gene at that link.Studies on SERT and other things like that do get discussed here, usually more when they are first discovered. I think if you search for SERT, especially over in the news and abstracts section you will find some things on it.They do find some actual physical differences between IBSers and healthy controls. There is some evidence some people are at a higher genetic risk of getting IBS than others from looking at IBS frequencies in twins. However it isn't a you have the gene you have the disease sort of condition. Like diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and a lot of other illnesses the genes make you a little more likely or a little less likely to get it and certain environmental triggers add into whether you get it or not.One known environmental trigger for starting IBS is GI infections.There have been enough biomarkers found to develop a blood test to help in the diagnosis of IBS. It also includese the biomarkers for other illnesses that tend to have symptom overlap with IBS. A biomarker is any compound in the blood that shows up differently in different groups of patients.