Year: 2024
Type: editorial
Abstract: Q1 What initially sparked your interest in the field of gastroenterology, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in particular?Very often the biggest decisions in life occur by chance.I went into gastroenterology when I was still very young, starting a fellowship, and didn't know what to do.I spoke with one of my mentors in medical school, who told me I should go into gastroenterology because it's very diverse.And why IBD?As soon as I arrived at the department of Gastroenterology in CHU Lille, France, I was amazed by the number of young people admitted with IBD.This was very novel.The disease was originally described in North America, and now it's all over the world.What was fascinating, and this has never been published, is that in the early 70s there were already a lot of cases of IBD, mostly Crohn's disease (CD), in Belgium and the Netherlands, and very few cases in Northern France.At that time, in the post-World War II era, we had common meetings with gastroenterologists from Belgium, and they very often presented their cases of IBD.We didn't have that, but then within a few years we saw this huge number of patients coming in.I thought this was very interesting and decided to focus on this disease.My goal, with the ambition of youth, would be to find the cause and the cure of IBD Interestingly, we had more cases of CD than ulcerative colitis (UC) in Northern France, which is not usual in many countries, including the UK or Scandinavia, where they have more cases of UC.
Source: EMJ Gastroenterology
Language: English
Topic: Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402754556