Preventing Crohn's When Both Its Cause and Cure Remain Elusive

Most patients with Crohn's disease head off on a guilt trip after the immediate shock of diagnosis.

The first thing they usually ask is whether the disease will kill them. The second is how they got it. Eventually, they pull themselves together enough to ask their doctor - or another patient - what will cure them.

Unlike ulcerative colitis, the second inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease has no cure. Yank the large intestine of an ulcerative colitis sufferer, and the patient is cured. Not so with us.

In 25 years of volunteering to help other IBD patients, I have found that those on the longest guilt trip are those from families in which they are the first to be diagnosed with either disease. Although medical professionals recognize a pronounced tendency for Crohn's disease to cluster in families - consider the family of 10 children, 9 of whom were Crohn's patients - I was the first and only person in my family thus far to be diagnosed with the illness.

Where did I get it? What if anything could I have done differently? My answers: (1) I probably will never know, and (2) absolutely nothing.

We know that individuals who grow up in countries where Crohn's disease is unheard of can develop the disease once they've lived in a Western country for a while. The ideas on what causes the disease run into the dozens. Among the most popular: a high-fat diet, a low- (or even high-) fiber diet, drinking too much milk as a child and being exposed to tuberculosis. Most recently favored are contracting a virus at some unknown point, having a wacked-out autoimmune system and serving as host to some weird bacteria.

Whatever it was, I was sick from an unknown cause from age 8 until being diagnosed at 31.

If I were to lie awake at night hashing over the fact that I might have eaten one hamburger too many as a child, I would never accomplish much anything in life. It might be more productive to just blame my parents.

The simple fact is that I really don't much care, as I approach the eligibility age for Social Security, what caused my Crohn's disease. I hope for the next generation that researchers find a cure. However, knowing whether something I did or failed to do made me ill won't put back any tissue that five surgeries have removed.

Like so many other Crohn's patients, I suffer from allergies and other conditions related to a faulty autoimmune system. If I were tested, I'm 110 percent sure I would have the identified gene markers for the disease. So what?

If I had to guess, I would say that I was born from an old egg, to a mother pushing 40. Old eggs are sometimes not the best.

So in the final analysis, I guess I'll blame my parents after all.