Hello,
I'm new here, but have lived with an IPAA since 1990 after a short but intense 2-round fight with UC. While I was a taekwondo competitor and master instructor, the UC cut my Olympic dream short, and eventually the prednisone ate my hip sockets, and one knee, ending my instruction career. I sold my studio in San Diego in 1999, and found a job at the Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs doing some research and writing, mostly because it came with the insurance I needed to have my joints replaced. And when that job ended, I went back to college, took a Bachelors in biology, a Master's in education and immunology. I'm now in another Master's program at CU Medical School in biomedical sciences and biotechnology.
Anyhow, I try to get information that might prove helpful to fellow 'pouchers' primarily from the peer-review literature, which I'm, by-and-large, able to mostly understand.
Lately I've been sharing some recent work regarding what underlies pouchitis, which I get 1-2 times per year. Fortunately 3-4 day of metronidazole (Flagyl) clears up nicely. Regardless, I though I'd start sharing some of the research here, and I'm willing (at least while on break from school) to help explain the good stuff in fairly lay terms. I'll also look up answers to well-formed questions anyone cares to ask me since I have institutional access to many medical publications through the university.
Cheers and thanks for letting me join your group
Here's a very good review from 2017, with I'm working on digesting right now!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co...df/10.1111/den.12744
And here's one related to diet and pouchitis. If you don't have the time or the energy to digest this peer-review paper, I'll give the the TLDR [Too Long. Didn't Read.] version:
In a year-long study of 172 IPAA patients, ~31% of those with the lowest fruit intake (<1.5 servings/day) developed pouchitis. Of those that ate more fruit only about 4% developed pouchitis. The authors suspect changes in the pouch microbiome was the helpful factor, rather than fiber, as people who had high fiber intake from grains, rather than fruit, did not benefit.
A "serving" of fruit is considered to be 80 g or about 4 oz. The article did not specify which fruits might be best as the only variable was total daily fruit intake.
I don't know about you, but I've avoided fruit suspecting it might give me the runs, but this was not the case at all in this study!