gut health news, articles and features | 91av

Smart underwear detects lactose intolerance by tracking your farts

Chris Simms — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:00:07 +0000

A device you attach to your underwear reveals how often you really break wind – and it’s probably more frequently than you think

Frailty sets in far earlier than you’d expect, but you can reverse it

David Cox — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:00:48 +0000

We’re learning that frailty can quietly arrive decades before old age, with some people in their 30s or 40s unknowingly in a pre-frail state. There are surprising ways to stay strong – and it’s not all about weight training

This doctor is on the hunt for people with first-rate faeces

Alice Klein — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:36 +0000

Elizabeth Hohmann is very interested in faeces, and spends her days sifting through stools to find those that could make the biggest difference to other people's health

Realising the importance of our microbiome: Best ideas of the century

Helen Thomson — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:00:01 +0000

Humans have been inadvertently using microbes to influence our health for thousands of years. But only recently has the microbiome rocketed to the forefront of healthcare

Barnacle gloop could improve inflammatory bowel disease treatments

Carissa Wong — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:32:08 +0000

A "living glue" used by barnacles to attach to underwater surfaces could also seal gut wounds caused by inflammatory bowel disease

Man whose gut made its own alcohol gets relief from faecal transplant

Alice Klein — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:00:54 +0000

A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor

CAR T-cell therapy makes ageing guts heal themselves

Esra Öz — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:00:11 +0000

Immune cells are most commonly engineered to kill cancers, but now, scientists have shown the technique makes the gut lining of older mice resemble that of younger mice, raising hopes that the same approach could work in people

Common type of inflammatory bowel disease linked to toxic bacteria

Michael Le Page — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:00:37 +0000

Ulcerative colitis is characterised by inflammation of the lining of the colon and rectum

BSIP SA/Alamy

A toxin produced by bacteria found in dirty water kills off immune cells in the lining of the colon, meaning people whose guts are colonised by these bacteria are much more likely to develop a condition known as ulcerative colitis.

That is the conclusion of a series of studies in people and animals conducted by at Nanjing University in China and her colleagues. If this finding is confirmed, it could lead to new treatments for the condition.

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Ulcerative colitis is one of the two main kinds of inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD. It is characterised by inflammation of the lining of the colon and rectum. People typically have periods of no symptoms that alternate with flare-ups. The most serious cases can require the removal of the colon.

The causes of ulcerative colitis have been uncertain, but it is usually regarded as an autoimmune disease with complex environmental and genetic causes. Zhang and her team suspected that immune cells known as macrophages might play a role.

Macrophages are found in most tissues in the body, where they mop up any debris or bacteria and also help regulate local immune responses. They can sound the alarm to call in more immune cells, causing inflammation, but – crucially – they can also sound the all-clear, reducing inflammation.

In colon tissue taken from people with ulcerative colitis, the researchers found lower levels of resident macrophage cells than in people without the condition. They then showed that killing macrophages in the colons of mice made them more susceptible to colitis. The researchers think the loss of the protection usually provided by the macrophages results in the lining of the colon becoming damaged and inflamed.

But why were macrophage levels lower in people with ulcerative colitis? By testing samples of faecal bacteria from people with the condition, the team found a toxin called aerolysin, which turns out to be highly damaging to macrophages but has little effect on other cells in the gut.

Aerolysin is produced by some strains of bacteria in the genus Aeromonas, which are commonly found in fresh and brackish waters. The researchers call the strains that produce aerolysin MTB (macrophage-toxic bacteria).

When the team deliberately infected mice with MTB, this made them more susceptible to colitis. But if the gene for aerolysin was deleted from the bacteria, or if the toxin was neutralised by antibodies, the mice didn’t become more susceptible to colitis.

Finally, the researchers looked for Aeromonas bacteria in stool samples. They found them in 72 per cent of 79 people with ulcerative colitis, but only 12 per cent of 480 people without the condition. This test couldn’t reveal whether these bacteria were MTB and therefore if they produced aerolysin.

Overall, the studies point to a complex picture. Not every case of ulcerative colitis may involve MTB, and people can also have MTB in their guts without developing colitis.

“We cannot conclude that MTB is the sole cause of ulcerative colitis,” says Zhang. “Persistent MTB infection can induce a hypersensitive state in the colon, but this does not mean that every infected individual will develop colitis.

“The occurrence of colitis in this context is undoubtedly influenced by environmental and genetic factors,” she says.

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There are at least three potential approaches for developing new treatments, says Zhang. One would be to develop drugs that neutralise the toxin. Another would be to develop vaccines targeting either the toxin or the bacteria that produce it. The third would be to use viruses that kill specific bacteria, known as phage therapy, to eliminate the toxin-producing bacteria.

“The case is strong for the MTB toxin disrupting gut immunity by depleting special macrophages in the gut tissue,” says at University Hospital Münster in Germany.

He points out that when the team killed off all gut bacteria in mice, then infected them with MTB, the animals didn’t become more susceptible to colitis. This suggests other, as-yet-unidentified bacteria also play a role.

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“Nevertheless, it may represent an important, missing factor in the multi-step pathogenesis of ulcerative colitis, at least in China,” says Kriegel.

Zhang and her team now plan to do wider epidemiological studies to try to confirm the link between MTB and ulcerative colitis. If MTB infections do play a role and are becoming more common, it might help explain why the incidence of IBD is rising.

Journal reference:

Science

Therapy may be the most effective way to ease irritable bowel syndrome

Carissa Wong — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:30:24 +0000

Irritable bowel syndrome could be relieved through techniques taught in types of therapy

Sladic/Getty Images

Therapies that alter the behaviour of people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may be more effective than the existing go-to treatments. If offered digitally, these could also help speed up their relief. IBS commonly results in bloating, diarrhoea, constipation and abdominal pain. While its causes are unclear, is thought to play a major role. Gut infections or certain foods may trigger the gastrointestinal tract to send alarm signals to the brain, while psychological stress can send them the other way, hence why .

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Dietary advice and drugs like laxatives can help, but for some, symptoms persist, leading researchers to explore novel approaches such as faecal transplants. As somewhat of a last resort, doctors often turn to behavioural therapies, which a 2020 review suggested These can include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which helps people change how they think and act to manage and accept their symptoms, and gut-directed hypnotherapy, where people are put into a trance-like state before receiving suggestions that their symptoms are improving. With more studies published since then, at the University of Leeds in the UK and his colleagues – some of whom were involved in the earlier review – have now sifted through 67 randomised-controlled trials, involving more than 7000 participants. These compared behavioural therapies that lasted between four and 12 weeks with various control groups who received standard interventions like dietary advice or laxatives, or who were on a waiting list for therapy. “It’s the largest review of behavioural IBS treatments in terms of number of studies and participants [to my knowledge],” says at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The researchers found that CBT and gut-directed hypnotherapy – delivered either in-person or via an app or the internet – were more effective than standard treatments, based on the participants comparing their symptoms before and after.

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Rather than being offered only after standard interventions haven’t sufficiently helped, and then usually solely in-person, the findings suggest that behavioural therapies should be rolled out much earlier, with digital approaches helping to deliver at speed, says Ford. “They could give you a way of scaling up behavioural therapy to be delivered on a mass scale,” he says. But more trials that directly compare digital therapies to standard ones are needed before guidelines can be updated, says Ford, who thinks this could take another five years. In addition, most of the participants in the studies couldn’t be blinded to which group they were in, so some of the benefits may be down to the placebo effect, says Lindfors. Trials where participants receive either a complete form of a therapy or only parts of it could help to assess the scale of this effect, if they were all under the impression they were getting the actual behavioural treatment, says Lindfors.