CD34 and inflammatory bowel disease: Decrease or complete loss of CD34+ stromal cells identified as telocytes has been reported in various diseases associated with fibrotic complications, such as systemic sclerosis (Manetti et al., 2013), heart failure (Richter and Kostin, 2015), liver fibrosis (Fu et al., 2015), gynecologic diseases (Varga et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2023), and IBD.