Reading and writing fill in the blanks
People who have suffered from inflammatory bowel disease will know the discomfort and inconvenience it can cause, with including abdominal pain, diarrhoea and bloody stools. Treatment comes with side effects. Also, most drugs are effective for less than a year; thereafter, the patient no longer well to the treatment, said Assistant Professor Wang Jiong-Wei at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. He and his colleagues believe, however, that a type of milk nanoparticle they have extracted may be the answer to these problems. These milk particles are from milk that had most of its components, such as lactose, removed by a series of processes. They are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair and can be seen only with an electron microscope and can pass through the gut and survive the stomach’s gastric environment to reach the intestines. At the disease sites, they will reduce gut inflammation and the bacterial community there. They also have the potential to protect the gut barrier, which helps the gut to absorb nutrient molecules for the body’s use, said Wang.