BAX and colitis: On the other hand, the reports suggest that apoptosis is thought to be one of the major accelerators of the disruption of intestinal epithelial integrity in colitis, which is mainly executed by the apoptosis effector caspase-3 and combined with the intrinsic apoptosis pathway associated with caspase-9, the pro-apoptotic protein Bax and the anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2 to mediate the apoptotic signals (Dirisina et al., 2011; Lin et al., 2017; Kuo et al., 2019).