The recent demonstration of a role of Escherichia coli in the development of invasive carcinoma in mice ushers a new era of bacterial involvement in cancer etiology. It has been shown previously that the colonic mucosa of colorectal carcinoma (CRC) is exclusively colonized by intracellular E. coli instead of extracellular form found in normal colonic mucosa. Surprisingly, the DNA repair gene MU...

Background: Routine screening colonoscopy is on the rise and pathologists have to deal with the ever larger numbers of excised colonic polyps. It is very important to optimize the patients’ individual treatment and further surveillance. Pathologists play a critical role in management, as most of the clinical decisions concerning colonic polyp managemen...

In 2015, capsule endoscopy was introduced as the main investigation method for small bowel mucosal diseases, and its role in colonic diseases has been gradually revealed. Future challenges for capsule endoscopy, besides improvements of image quality and visualization of each part of the small bowel and colonic mucosa, include the development of gastric capsules, the capacity to perform histolog...

Symptomatic respiratory tract involvement with granulomatous bronchial lesions has not yet been described in Crohn's disease. We report two patients with colonic Crohn's disease and severe respiratory symptoms (dyspnoea associated in one of the patients with voicelessness); erythema, aphthoid and superficial ulcerations were found in the colon and whitish granulations in the bronchi at endoscop...

Adherent monolayer cultures of human blood monocytes, peritoneal macrophages, bone marrow macrophages, and colonic mucosa macrophages were examined for their ability to produce and secrete minactivin, a specific inactivator of urokinase-type plasminogen activator. All except colonic mucosa macrophages produced and secreted appreciable amounts of minactivin, but only blood monocytes were stimula...

Colonic bacteria liberate large quantities of the highly toxic gases hydrogen sulfide (H(2)S) and methanethiol (CH(3)SH). The colonic mucosa presumably has an efficient means of detoxifying these compounds, which is thought to occur through methylation of H(2)S to CH(3)SH and CH(3)SH to dimethylsulfide (CH(3)SCH(3)). We investigated this detoxification pathway by incubating rat cecal mucosal ho...

BACKGROUND Ulcerative colitis (UC) is characterized by an energy deficiency state of the colonic epithelium. This study evaluated mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) complex activity in normal and disease mucosa in patients with UC. Alterations in ETC complexes were also investigated in experimental colitis in mice. METHODS Biopsies were obtained from macroscopically normal and disea...

Measurements of cell proliferation can be used as biomarkers of preneoplastic change. In this study, two immunocytochemical methods that measure different components of the cell cycle were compared to assess cell proliferation on biopsy samples from human colonic mucosa. These methods are based on a monoclonal antibody against 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine (BrdU), which is confined to S phase cells, a...

A 54-year-old man was referred to our department for colorectal cancer screening. The colonoscopy revealed, at the ascending colon, several white plaques, some confluent, interspersed with normal mucosa (Fig. 1). Biopsies were performed and the histopathological examination showed a fragment of polypoid colonic mucosa with optically empty vacuoles in the lamina propria (Fig. 2) and irregular cy...

DNA synthetic (S) phase fractions of normal appearing colonic mucosa in Japanese and British patients with colorectal neoplasms were compared with those in patients without colonic neoplasms. Normal crypts were isolated from fresh surgical specimens of the large intestine by the use of EDTA. After fixation with 70% ethanol, isolated crypts were digested with pepsin into single nuclei suspension...