Inflammatory Bowel

In the terms of medicine the term inflammatory bowel disease is an desscriptive term used to cover a range of conditions.
If you look at a lot of medical terms they are descriptions of things people suffer or experience. So inflammatory bowel diseases are conditions that affect the bowel, obviously, that are causing inflammation and inflammation is in some respects useful to us when we have a cut or a bruise or a cold, it’s the body’s way of getting rid of things we don’t want but can be a problem if it gets out of control. So inflammation we can understand on the skin might look red, it might look sore, it might look inflamed. So inflammatory bowel disease covers a number of conditions but the two main ones that come to mind which are Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Now in both of these the lining of the gut, the mucosa, becomes inflamed. Nobody knows what really causes either condition, there are thought to be genetic tendencies but it’s not quite as simple as being if it’s in the family you’ll get it. There are thought to be ideas about autoimmune response so it might be the body producing antibodies and there are different theories about it being triggered off by viruses. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with food; it’s not an allergic type problem at all. The sorts of symptoms that people get with inflammatory bowel disease is pains in the gut or abdomen, sometimes bleeding from the bowel, some people nausea and fevers in some instances, often diarrhoea – that can be one of the hallmark symptoms, but of course keep in mind there are many other causes for diahorrea so if you do get diarrhoea it doesn’t mean “oh my god I’ve got inflammatory bowel disease”.
The condition generally starts for people in their twenties and thirties, it tends to affect younger people and it’s a condition that it is fairly lifelong. It doesn’t mean the symptoms are bad the whole time and these conditions can go through ups and downs or relapses and remissions.
Treatment-wise there are generally medications that can be used and these are quite specialised so if you are getting to that stage you will probably be referred by your GP who obviously is your first port of call and step one in these situations is to establish a diagnosis. Diagnosis can be done typically with scopes of the bowel, if the symptoms are sufficient and suspicious you may have a colonoscopy done and some biopsies might be taken and that would give the diagnosis. In turn, as I touched on before, your treatment may be medications, surgery if it’s indicated in some instances particularly for Crohn’s disease, less commonly in ulcerative colitis. Dietary type changes; there is no one size fits all, again it’s a little bit of trial and error to what does and doesn’t agree with you and like with a lot of long term illnesses all the basic stuff come into play so looking after your health generally, looking at your weight, doing some regular exercise, keeping up with your fluids and rest and managing your stress. None of these are “cures” but anything that helps you overall health will help any condition that you may have.
So inflammatory bowel disease, not common, not every other person has it but it’s not an uncommon condition either. Diagnosis is something that will have to be done through your doctor and probably through a specialist as well – typically a gastroenterologist – and there are treatment options for you.
 

For more information on inflammatory bowel disease, including how the digestive system works, types of IBD and useful videos, see Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).