Introduction: Ulcerative colitis is a disease confined to the mucosa and submucosa of the colon, the etiology of which has not been fully elucidated. It is a chronic nonspecific inflammatory disease that mainly invades the colonic mucosa, with clinical symptoms of varying severity, alternating between remission and exacerbation, and patients may have only colonic symptoms or systemic symptoms. Some relevant studies on ulcerative colitis in 2016 are shared with you. 1. vitamin D deficiency can promote the development of ulcerative colitis 2. yoga can improve the quality of life of patients with ulcerative colitis 3. fecal transplantation can treat ulcerative colitis 4. ozanimod has shown initial success in treating ulcerative colitis 5. focus on C. difficile infection in patients with ulcerative colitis According to a recent study published online in The AmericanJournal of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) makes patients with newly diagnosed ulcerative colitis (UC) have a poorer prognosis and increases their risk of colectomy, postoperative complications and death, according to a population-based cohort study published online recently in The American Journal of Gastroenterology. Gilaad G. Kaplan, MD, PhD, of the Cumming School of Medicine, and colleagues said previous studies have shown that patients with ulcerative colitis are at higher risk for C. difficile infection compared with patients with Crohn’s disease and the general population, and that C. difficile is associated with an increased risk of colon resection and postoperative complications. In this study, they aimed to validate ICD-10 diagnosis codes for CDI in patients with UC and to determine the cumulative risk of CDI after UC diagnosis, the impact of CDI on the risk of colectomy and mortality, and the relationship between CDI and postoperative complications. The study included 1754 Alberta residents with a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis from April 2003 to March 2010. As a result, the risk of CDI five years after UC diagnosis was 3.4% (95% CI, 2.5-4.6). After adjusting for age, sex and comorbidities, the researchers found that the risk of colectomy was higher among UC patients diagnosed with CDI compared to those without a diagnosis of CDI, as was the risk of death. A diagnosis of CDI at least 90 days prior to colectomy was associated with an increased risk of postoperative complications. 6. New biomarker may accurately identify Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis Newly discovered biomarkers may help diagnose and guide treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to researchers in Canada. The researchers evaluated proteomics on biopsies from 99 patients who had not undergone any treatment. To identify relevant proteins in a subset of the larger study, they validated their findings in a second subset. After quantifying more than 3,500 proteins, they identified a set (5) of proteins that distinguished IBD patients from control patients with 95.9% accuracy; and a set (12) of proteins that distinguished CD from UC with 80% accuracy. They also identified 116 proteins associated with the severity of the disease, of which four (including endolipin and metallothionein-2) were members of the two groups of proteins mentioned above.