GAST and irritable bowel syndrome: However, gastrointestinal EECs interact and communicate with each other in complicated ways; it is reported that the higher densities of gastrin-producing cells and lower somatostatin-producing cells observed in the antrum of IBS patients cannot be explained by abnormal stem cells like those that are seen in the small and large intestines, given that the densities of Musashi-1-positive cells don’t differ between IBS patients and healthy controls in the stomach (78).