DISEASE DOWN UNDER

Posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 6:17 am

A young man, they say, will do anything for sex. A middle-age man will do anything for money. An older man will do anything for respect. But all men will do anything for a good bowel movement.

The problem is that a lot can go wrong between digestion and elimination, irritable bowel syndrome being an all-too-common example. IBS, as it’s affectionately called, isn’t life-threatening and doesn’t lead to harder stuff like colorectal cancer. It isn’t inflammatory and doesn’t permanently damage the bowel. In fact, it’s not really a disease but, rather, a “functional disorder.”

The function it disorders is bowel movement. You can have painful constipation with difficult or infrequent bowel movements. Or you can have equally painful diarrhea with a lot of loose stools and urgent desires to reduce the real estate between your irritable bowel and a toilet. Or you can enjoy both versions. Adding to the pleasure are crampy abdominal pain, gassiness, and bloating.

As bad as IBS sounds (and feels), it’s not nearly as serious as inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD. This is a group of disorders that cause inflammation and ulceration in the small and large intestines. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, the two major members of the IBD family, cause symptoms similar to IBS. But they also can offer nasty bonuses – like rectal bleeding, weight loss, fever and anemia.

Doctors aren’t sure what causes IBS or IBD. They do know that unlike IBS, IBD has a genetic element to it; 20 percent of people with Crohn’s disease have a blood relative with some form of inflammatory bowel disease. There’s no cure for either one, though treatment under a doctor’s care can ease the discomfort. So can the following recommendations from the National Institutes of Health.

Assess your food. Milk products, large amounts of alcohol, avocados, and excess fat of any kind can contract your bowel in inconvenient ways. But different folks react to different foods, so the National Institutes of Health recommends that you actually keep a journal of the relationship between what goes in and how it comes out. It’s not exactly the kind of diary material that made Samuel Pepys famous, but it could help you avoid undue distress from IBS.

Don’t overeat. Those seven-course extravaganzas can cause cramping and diarrhea in people with IBS. Try smaller meals more often or just eat smaller portions. And keep the fiber high and the fat low. High-fiber diets mildly distend the colon (the largest section of the bowel, or large intestine), and that helps prevent symptom-starting spasms from developing. You may feel some bloating when you first up the fiber, but that should stop as your body adjusts to the better diet.

Lessen your stress. Another trigger for IBS symptoms is emotional stress, which can also aggravate the symptoms of IBD simply by increasing the number of bowel movements.

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