CED News

Working together medical school faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University have discovered a previously unrecognized cause of pancreatitis, a common ailment often correctly attributed to alcohol or drug abuse but also of mysterious -- or"idiopathic" -- origin. The researchers say the newly discovered culprit has nothing to do with substance use or anatomic abnormalities. Instead, it involves mutations in the gene that causes the highly debilitating disease known as cystic fibrosis or. A report on the team's findings appears in the December issue of Gastroenterology, a medical journal. www.unc.edu; www.duke.edu