Top gastroenterologists in Minnesota

Edward Loftus is a senior IBD clinician at Mayo Clinic and the Zarrow Family Professor of Gastroenterology for IBD. He cares for patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, including many who have cycled through multiple therapies without durable remission.

His 2004 paper in Gastroenterology pulled together population-based data on how often IBD actually occurs in U.S. communities and which environmental factors — smoking, diet, early infections — push the risk up or down, and it is still one of the most cited references on the subject ². He helped write the 2005 Montreal classification, which gave clinicians a shared language for describing where Crohn's disease is located, how it behaves, and how severe ulcerative colitis is at a given moment ¹. He also co-authored the STRIDE recommendations ³ and the ACG's adult Crohn's disease guideline ⁴, both of which shape how your IBD doctor decides when your disease is truly under control rather than just quieter. If you are a patient who is weighing whether a long steroid course is safe, his 2001 population study on the natural history of steroid therapy in IBD is worth knowing about ⁵.

Sunanda Kane is a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine whose IBD practice focuses on questions women often cannot find a clear answer to elsewhere, especially around pregnancy, fertility, and inflammatory bowel disease. She practices at Mayo Clinic Rochester and at St. Marys Hospital.

Her 2007 community-based study in Gastroenterology looked at pregnancy outcomes in women with IBD and helped replace folklore with data on actual risks of miscarriage, preterm birth, and congenital abnormalities ⁸. She then led the AGA IBD Parenthood Project, published in Gastroenterology in 2019, which produced the first national care pathway telling clinicians how to manage Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis before, during, and after pregnancy — including which medications are safe to continue ¹⁰. Her other work includes using fecal lactoferrin as a noninvasive marker of gut inflammation ⁹, a 2010 study on measuring infliximab drug levels and antibodies that changed how clinicians decide whether to switch biologics ⁶, and a trial of rifaximin for irritable bowel syndrome that helped establish the antibiotic as an option for IBS with diarrhea ⁷.

Michael Camilleri is the Bean Professor at Mayo Clinic and medical director of the Clinical Enteric Neuroscience Translational and Epidemiological Research (CENTER) Program. He treats patients with motility disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, and unexplained GI symptoms — a patient population that has often been told for years there is nothing wrong.

His 2002 technical review on IBS and his 2006 paper on functional gastroduodenal disorders helped set the diagnostic framework clinicians still use when symptoms do not match a structural disease ¹¹¹². His 2019 Gut review on the leaky gut concept was one of the first careful clinical assessments to take the idea seriously and explain what can actually be measured in patients, rather than treating the phrase as a diagnosis on its own ¹³. His earlier review on intestinal barrier function continues to guide how researchers and clinicians think about what "barrier dysfunction" really means in IBS and IBD ¹⁴. A separate 2016 meta-analysis in JAMA he contributed to looked at weight-loss medications and adverse events, giving primary care clinicians and GI specialists a clearer picture of what to expect from each drug ¹⁵.

Vijay Shah is a professor of medicine and physiology at Mayo Clinic and a hepatologist who cares for patients with cirrhosis, portal hypertension, alcoholic hepatitis, and rare vascular liver diseases like Budd-Chiari syndrome. He also serves as Mayo's executive dean of research.

His 2005 paper in Hepatology showed that the MELD score — originally designed for liver transplant allocation — also accurately predicted who would die from alcoholic hepatitis, which helped transplant programs decide which patients with alcohol-associated liver failure are sick enough to need urgent evaluation ²⁰. He contributed to the Baveno VII international consensus in the Journal of Hepatology, which is the reference clinicians use worldwide to treat bleeding esophageal varices and other complications of portal hypertension ¹⁶. His earlier NEJM review on Budd-Chiari syndrome remains a standard reference for this rare condition in which veins draining the liver become blocked ¹⁹. Shah's basic science work in Nature and Hepatology on how the liver's blood vessels regulate pressure helps explain why certain treatments for portal hypertension work ¹⁷¹⁸.

Harmeet Malhi is a professor of medicine and physiology at Mayo Clinic and a hepatologist whose clinical focus is fatty liver disease — now the most common chronic liver condition in the country — and its progressive form, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Her lab work published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 2006 worked out one of the mechanisms by which saturated fats actually injure liver cells, through a kinase pathway called JNK that triggers programmed cell death ²². Her 2010 review in the Journal of Hepatology connected fatty liver disease, drug-induced liver injury, and hepatitis to a common theme of endoplasmic reticulum stress, a cellular response that drug developers are now targeting ²¹. Her 2008 Seminars in Liver Disease paper on lipotoxicity laid out why circulating free fatty acids are not just storage fuel but a direct driver of steatohepatitis ²⁵. For patients trying to understand why fatty liver disease progresses in some people and stays quiet in others, her mechanistic work explains part of the biology ²³²⁴.

Mark Topazian is an emeritus professor in the GI and hepatology division at Mayo Clinic and an advanced endoscopist whose clinical practice centered on pancreatic disease, esophageal disorders, and IgG4-related disease — an immune condition that can mimic pancreatic cancer, autoimmune pancreatitis, and several other organ diseases.

He led the 2015 international consensus in Arthritis & Rheumatology on how IgG4-related disease should be managed, the reference document clinicians use when a patient's imaging or pathology points to this diagnosis ²⁶. He also contributed to the first prospective trial of rituximab in IgG4-related disease, which showed the drug worked even in patients who had not responded to steroids ²⁷. On the pancreas side, he was part of the multicenter U.S. series that established direct endoscopic necrosectomy — an incision-free approach through the stomach — as a standard treatment for walled-off pancreatic necrosis, a complication of severe pancreatitis ²⁹. His work on self-expanding plastic stents for benign esophageal disease ³⁰ and on screening approaches for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma ²⁸ continues to inform practice around the world.