Crohn’s Disease Causes: Is Fungus a Factor?

Noted: David Andes, MD, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, says the term he likes for this imbalance is “dysbiosis.” “It’s not that there weren’t fungi there before, but now there are different fungi and different bacteria, in different proportions,” Dr. Andes says. “And when they experimentally combined the fungi and bacteria they found in patients with Crohn’s disease, they provoked inflammation, which may contribute to the disease process in Crohn’s.”