This Week in Modern Pathology

Researchers led by Robert Odze at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston report on their clinical and pathological analysis of Crohn's disease in Modern Pathology. The researchers compared patients with colonic Crohn's disease and those with colonic and ileal Crohn's disease. "Patients with isolated colonic Crohn's disease at initial presentation show distinct clinical and pathological features compared with the colon of patients who present with both ileal and colonic involvement," the authors write, adding that "further studies should be conducted to determine whether the histology of the colon in patients with colonic Crohn's disease is related to the development of malignancy, molecular phenotype, and specific outcome, on a prospective basis."

University of Minnesota Medical School's Youngki Kim and his colleagues describe their study of laminin isoform expression in diabetic neuropathy and other renal diseases in an advance, online Modern Pathology article. They found that ?5, ?2 and ?1 chains — which are part of the glomerular basement membrane — are over-expressed in diabetic nephropathy kidneys. "The alterations in basement membrane composition in various renal diseases seem to not only reflect the balance between synthesis and degradation of normal basement membrane constituents, but also the aberrant new expression of basement membrane molecules," Kim and his colleagues say. "Thus, tissue remodeling may incorporate both an increase of normal constituents and emergence of abnormal constituents during disease exemplified by diabetes."

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This Week in Modern Pathology