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Observational Study
. 2025 Feb 9;17(4):620.
doi: 10.3390/nu17040620.

The Importance of Nutriepigenetics in Older Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Ana-Gabriela Prada  1 , Costina Daniela Gîță  1   2 , Sandra Monica Gîdei  1   2 , Doina Istratescu  1 , Tudor Stroie  1   3 , Sorina Maria Aurelian  1   2 , Gabriel Ioan Prada  1   4 , Ovidiu Nicolae Penes  1 , Anca Lucia Pop  1 , Mihai Mircea Diculescu  1   3
Affiliations
Observational Study

The Importance of Nutriepigenetics in Older Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Ana-Gabriela Prada et al. Nutrients. .

Abstract

Background: 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.

Materials and methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.

Keywords: geographical distribution; inflammatory bowel disease; nutriepigenetics; older adult; organic diet.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Descriptive analysis of the patient population. Std. error means “standard” error and the same for “std. deviation”, it means “standard deviation”. The N refers to the number of subjects.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distributions of smoking habits among older adult patients with IBD.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distributions of relapse episodes per year at diagnosis according to age groups and IBD types. There is a linear forecast representation of the probable evolution of relapse episodes across age groups, both for CD and UC.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Regression analysis for outcomes of the SCCAI after diet change when medication was used and organic food was taken into account.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Regression analysis for outcomes related to medication use or organic food.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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