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Adverse health effects of emerging contaminants on inflammatory bowel disease

Frontiers in Public Health 2023 44 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count.
Xuejie Chen, Sidan Wang, Xueyi Mao, Xin Xiang, Xin Xiang, Shuyu Ye, Jie Chen, Angran Zhu, Yifei Meng, Xiya Yang, Shuyu Peng, Minzi Deng, Xiaoyan Wang

Summary

This review summarizes how emerging environmental contaminants, including microplastics, endocrine disruptors, herbicides, and heavy metals, may contribute to inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers found evidence that these pollutants can disrupt gut barrier function, alter the microbiome, and trigger immune responses linked to bowel inflammation. The study suggests that reducing exposure to these increasingly common contaminants could help lower the rising incidence of inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is becoming increasingly prevalent with the improvement of people's living standards in recent years, especially in urban areas. The emerging environmental contaminant is a newly-proposed concept in the progress of industrialization and modernization, referring to synthetic chemicals that were not noticed or researched before, which may lead to many chronic diseases, including IBD. The emerging contaminants mainly include microplastics, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, chemical herbicides, heavy metals, and persisting organic pollutants. In this review, we summarize the adverse health effect of these emerging contaminants on humans and their relationships with IBD. Therefore, we can better understand the impact of these new emerging contaminants on IBD, minimize their exposures, and lower the future incidence of IBD.

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