News

The upside of Linda Mansfield's research is that it may lead to a new treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.

The downside is that the treatment would involve swallowing worm eggs.

Ms. Mansfield is a professor of microbiology at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of parasites.

She is also one of several researchers around the country looking at the use of threadlike intestinal parasites called whipworms to treat the disease, which can cause diarrhea, painful cramps and even intestinal bleeding.

“It's extremely debilitating,” Ms. Mansfield told the Lansing State Journal for a story Friday. “People talk about having 256 bouts of diarrhea a year when they have this disease. It gets to the level where some of them are not able to work.”

Inflammatory bowel disease, the most common forms of which are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is virtually unknown in the developing world but is becoming increasingly common in industrialized countries.

Researchers have offered several explanations for that, among them diets high in fat and refined foods. But another possible cause, Ms. Mansfield said, is increasing levels of hygiene.

Portions of the immune system actually require periodic infections in order to develop properly. Some exposure to dirt, bacteria and even worms can be beneficial.

“By living in an ultraclean environment,” she said, “we're removing some of the things that helped to educate our immune system.”

Ms. Mansfield said it is possible that the human immune system developed in a way that is reliant, to some degree, on the presence of parasitic worms.

She was not the first to hit on that idea. A research team at the University of Iowa already has tried treating human patients with a whipworm egg and Gatorade cocktail. Their results were promising.

David Elliott was a member of that team.

“There are probably individuals in the population who, back when worms were prevalent, were the healthiest because their immune systems could fight off all sorts of things,” he said. “When worms are removed, their immune systems become unbridled, and they move on to develop disease.”

Ms. Mansfield came to the topic from an animal angle.

More than a decade ago, she began studying whipworm infections in pigs, initially trying to develop a vaccine against the parasites.

One of the things she noticed along the way, however, was that whipworm infections produced a strong anti-inflammatory immune response.

When given to patients with inflammatory bowel disease, the worms can help to counteract the inflammation and “actually reset the immune system to be in better balance,” she said.

Further, pig whipworms are relatively safe. Most people will expel them in a matter of weeks and, if that doesn't happen, they can be eliminated with anti-worm drugs.

That is promising, if a little unpleasant, for people such as Linda Rockey.

The Mason, Mich., woman has suffered from Crohn's disease for more than 30 years. Having tried most conventional treatments, she said she's “right at the end of the rope.”

If she had no other alternatives, she said, “if they said. ‘This is it. You eat these worms,' I would do it. At some point, you're willing to try anything.”

The whipworm treatment still needs to undergo further testing before it can be approved by the FDA.