Hi, Faith:
I'm quoting from memory an old study done on AS patients. Certainly they mean that the lesions "appear" just like Crohn's lesions but are not Crohn's.
The connection between AS and Crohn's is obvious to me, since a very good friend was diagnosed with this years ago, just after my own AS diagnosis. She had symptoms in advance of my own, and I studied about both diseases then and believed the cause and mechanism were the same.
Just recently, there has been some verification that Crohn's and AS are caused by the same germ perhaps showing that the genetic picture more complex because I suppose that we can agree that some other genetic factors can modulate AS up or down but the incidence of B27 in the Crohn's population is below 50%, yet these people can have all the characteristics of AS plus bowel destruction.
I once thought that AS could evolve into Crohn's, but that does not seem to be the case; better to think that it is a more aggressive type of AS that targets the bowel, whereas AS is certainly caused by intestinal issues, but it does not affect the integrity of the bowel itself as much as in Crohn's.
Regards,
John
