Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jun 14, 2016; 22(22): 5154-5164
Published online Jun 14, 2016. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v22.i22.5154
Structural and molecular features of intestinal strictures in rats with Crohn's-like disease
Petra Talapka, Anikó Berkó, Lajos István Nagy, Lalitha Chandrakumar, Mária Bagyánszki, László Géza Puskás, Éva Fekete, Nikolett Bódi
Petra Talapka, Anikó Berkó, Lalitha Chandrakumar, Mária Bagyánszki, Éva Fekete, Nikolett Bódi, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Neuroscience, Faculty of Sciences and Informatics, University of Szeged, H-6726 Szeged, Hungary
Lajos István Nagy, László Géza Puskás, Avidin Ltd., H-6726 Szeged, Hungary
Author contributions: Talapka P and Berkó A contributed equally to this work; Talapka P performed the majority of experiments and analyzed the data; Berkó A and Nagy LI performed the molecular investigations; Chandrakumar L and Bódi N participated equally in treatment of animals; Bagyánszki M, Puskás LG, Fekete E and Bódi N designed and coordinated the research; Talapka P, Fekete E and Bódi N wrote the paper; Talapka P and Berkó A contributed equally to this work.
Supported by Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, No. OTKA PD 108309 to Bódi N; and the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to Bagyánszki M.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Neuroscience, Faculty of Sciences, University of Szeged.
Institutional animal care and use committee statement: All procedures involving animals were reviewed and approved by the Institutional Animal Care and use committee of the University of Szeged (protocol number: EIK-645/2014.02.05).
Conflict-of-interest statement: We certify that there is no actual or potential conflict of interest in relation to this article.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author, Mária Bagyánszki at bmarcsi@bio.u-szeged.hu.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Mária Bagyánszki, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Neuroscience, Faculty of Sciences and Informatics, University of Szeged, H-6726 Szeged, Közép fasor 52, Hungary. bmarcsi@bio.u-szeged.hu
Telephone: +36-62-544123 Fax: +36-62-544291
Received: February 2, 2016
Peer-review started: February 9, 2016
First decision: March 7, 2016
Revised: March 23, 2016
Accepted: April 7, 2016
Article in press: April 7, 2016
Published online: June 14, 2016
Processing time: 120 Days and 19.7 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Intestinal strictures in Crohn’s disease (CD) cause hardly treatable complications in patients. The aim of this study was to find the correlation between the intestinal stricture formation, the damaged innervation of smooth muscle cells (SMCs) and the changed expression of TGF-beta 2, 3 and MMP9/TIMP1 in rats with CD by using different light- and electron microscopic and molecular biological methods. Our findings indicate that disintegration of SMCs due to the up-regulation of TGF-beta 2 and off-balance in MMP9/TIMP1 expression rather than neuronal cell death play the primary role in the formation of intestinal strictures in CD.