Consideration of Smoking in Patients with Crohn's Disease

I. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The prevailing theory for the pathogenesis of Crohn 's disease involves the trigger of an unchecked immune response by one or more environmental toxins in a genetically predisposed individual. The search for the implicated toxin has been unceasing in recent years and has led to many interesting observations, the most important of which has been the relationship of cigarette smoking to inflammatory bowel disease (1).