John Geibel and his team at Yale have also found a lock and key mechanism a receptor in the bowel which uses calcium to send signals which seem to regulate how well the bowel works and the balance between solids and fluids in our poo – hope you’ve finished your breakfast. Interestingly the receptor may be able to be controlled by calcium in the diet and substances in yoghurt.
This mechanism could be involved in a range of conditions including infectious diarrhoea inflammatory bowel disease irritable bowel syndrome and an under recognised problems in the elderly.
One of the things that’s called [b]black bowel syndrome[/b] where if you look at it the patient usually they’re over 65/70 years of age they’ll show up at their physician complaining that they have difficulty passing stool and when they do pass it it then usually becomes a watery type of diarrhoea. So they go for long periods where the stool is nothing and then there’s a big burst of stool.
And a lot of pain it’s sort of like a constipation type pain or like a pain that you would have with diarrhoea and they feel very discomforted and they don’t know why and they say I haven’t changed my diet nothing’s happened the physician will send them for some type of diagnostic imaging study and what they usually see is that [u]a section of intestine has for some reason lost its neuronal connection and it’s become ischaemic then it loses the oxygen and it actually changes colour because it’s dying it’s becoming like you do if someone has gangrene. [/u]And if you know how your intestine works where it’s sort of this squeeze/pull squeeze/pull action to move things along. Imagine that you suddenly have an area that doesn’t squeeze and pull so things move to that point and then it just hits that sort of dead zone and sits there.
When food sits in an area as we know if you leave food outside it decays rapidly imagine in your body where it’s at a nice 37 degrees Celsius you know nice and dark environment the bacteria will work and it happens for unknown reasons and it ends up with the person having a lot of discomfort and other issues because if it perforates they naturally can get a lot of problems. And the only way to treat it right now is to go in and excise that piece of intestine so cut it out. So the surgeon will then do an operation remove that piece connect what they hope are the healthy pieces back together but nobody can tell because as you’re cutting at the macro level you don’t know if you’ve gotten the good tissue and reconnected the good tissue or not. And many times unfortunately that patient will go home and a week or two later come back to their physician and say ‘well doc I’m back in the same state’.
And so we’re hoping with our technology and we have a paper that’s just coming out in the Annals of Surgery that we can show that we can protect from this ischaemic type of injury this lack of oxygen by activating this receptor.
[u]You can use dietary things so again it’s increasing the amount of calcium in the diet and it’s calcium in this case without vitamin D because we wanted to deliver the calcium further along through the intestine or coupled with the polyamines that come from yoghurts you’re going to probably protect yourself from having that.[/u][u][/u] And that’s starting to come out there’s clinical studies coming out that the intestines of the elderly are actually getting a lot better than they used to be because more and more people realise to include these things into their diet.
John Geibel is Professor of Surgery and Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine.