Gastrointestinal inflammation: focus on the vascular endothelium.

Ischemia of the intestine predominantly affects the small bowel and colon, and may ensue from a variety of causes, ranging from radiation enteritis to the use of drugs that affect the intestinal vasculature. Gut ischemia has historically been thought of as "large-vessel" disease, but microcirculatory pathology and ischemia-reperfusion injury is increasingly being implicated in gut infections and even in chronic idiopathic inflammatory processes involving the gut, such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.