An estimate of the number of intraepithelial lymphocytes in jejunal villous epithelium can be obtained by differential counting of nuclei in the epithelium. From counts carried out in 160 jejunal biopsies from patients who did not have coeliac disease the normal range has been established as 6-40 intraepithelial lymphocytes per 100 villous epithelial cells. In some biopsies there was a moderate...

Jejunal pseudo-diverticulosis is a rare acquired herniation of the mucosa and submucosa through weakened areas of the muscularis mucosa of the mesenteric aspect of the bowel. They are asymptomatic in the majority of cases; however, they can present with a wide spectrum of non-specific symptoms such as chronic abdominal discomfort, postprandial flatulence, diarrhoea, malabsorption and steattorho...

Lactic acid bacteria, either alive or dead, can improve villous atrophy caused by weaning in both piglets and mice. In this experiment, we tried to detect the molecules involved in this phenomenon with a real-time RT-PCR array approach. Weaning pups of mice were administered either a suspension of an Enterococcus faecalis EC-12 dried cell preparation (EC-12) or saline for 11 consecutive days af...

A seventy-year-old male presented with severe myasthenia gravis and an episode of obscure bleeding. There was a history of gastric ulcer leading to Billroth II surgery twenty-five years ago. Upper endoscopy revealed no pathology. Colonoscopy showed a few solitary diverticula and traces of old blood in the terminal ileum. Capsule endoscopy pictured red smear in the upper jejunum. Diverticula wer...

Jejunal biopsy was performed on control subjects and patients with treated and untreated coeliac disease. Monoclonal antibodies to T lymphocyte surface markers were used to quantify T cell phenotypic subsets in the jejunal mucosa. The patients with untreated coeliac disease had significantly more of both suppressor/cytotoxic and helper/inducer T cells in the surface epithelium than either the c...

Pancreatic proteases degrade the protein moiety of the R protein-cobalamin complex but not the intrinsic factor-cobalamin complex. Accordingly, we used these two proteins as substrates in an in vitro enzymatic assay to assess pancreatic function by incubating basal jejunal fluids with a mixture of intrinsic factor and cyano[57Co]cobalamin coupled to R-type protein and then using immunoprecipita...

Diamine oxidase plasma concentrations after treatment with heparin were measured and compared with the surface to volume ratio of jejunal biopsy samples assessed by a morphometric technique in patients with untreated and treated coeliac disease and in biopsied controls. As expected, enzyme activity was significantly lower in patients with untreated coeliac disease than in patients on a gluten-f...

Since there was no loss of bilirubin from the jejunal loop, and no loss of bilirubin when pigment was incubated with juice from the loop segment, or juice from the entire small intestine, it may be concluded that the intestinal juice per se has no effect in converting bilirubin to urobilin in a 2 hour period, and that in the jejunal loop there was no absorption of pigment or no conversion to ur...