The Importance of Nutriepigenetics in Older Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Nutriepigenetics, the study of nutritional effects on gene expression, offers new insights into the clinical variability and relapse frequency of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). As older adult populations are frequently unrepresented in the literature regarding their nutrition's influence on their gene expression, we considered that studying this aspect would shed light on this population group.

We conducted a prospective observational study on 60 IBD patients, categorized by age, residence, and nutrition access. Patients were grouped according to age groups ("young"-old-65-74 years old and old-old-75-86 years old), gender, IBD type, organic diet preference, Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index (SCCAI), and Harvey-Bradshaw Index (HBI) at diagnosis and after diet change. All patients were followed up at the Fundeni Clinical Institute in Bucharest, Romania, and received personalized dietary recommendations, in accordance with the European guidelines.

Our findings revealed that a diet that was predominantly organic had a positive impact on decreasing the number of relapse episodes, irrespective of IBD type. Predominant diets, rich in dairy and saturated fats, mostly from non-organic sources, exacerbated inflammation and increased the frequencies of relapses.

Older adult patients who adopted a predominantly organic diet had a reduction in frequency of relapse episodes, thus proving that diet is an important part of the treatment regimen of this population.