My poor Jack Russell has been sick with D since Christmas. Since he was still eating and not losing weight we waited, and waited and tried new foods in various forms. Poor thing would cry in pain and had no outward injuries. Turns out he has IBS. We spent a small fortune on testing and the vet prescribed a very high fiber dog food. It worked! He's fine now. I wish I had D instead of C, maybe I'll ask the vet's advice. I'm now a believer in diet and IBS link. Guess I'll start that food diary.
My dog has IBS
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We tried steroids for Gromit (our dog) but they seemed to make the D worse and Phew! Gas. Also had to add antacids. Do they have high fiber cat food? Sorry your kitty is sick. I love my dog but the vsl3 is for ME and too expensive to share. Doggie hypo tapes, hm-m-m now thats a money makin idea.
Sorry to hear about your dog but I am glad the new diet is working. It is amazing that our pets can get so much of what we suffer. Mine has terrible allergies right now. It really scares me sometimes because her eyes get so red and she gets out of breath when we go outside. Houston air is just great!
Bellyknot, it was a while ago with the cat. For the cat the steriods worked for the most part. Hard to tell with animals as they don't usally like to show pain unless they are really hurting, because its a sign of weekness carried over from the wild in their genes where they would be some other animals food.I was making a joke with the tapes, some of the people who have done them have said there animals get into them sometimes. The animals are probably in tue though more perhaps to the owners lol, although maybe they sense some healing or hurting going on, I know mine can do that. My parents have a fox terrier by the way and he is cool.
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Hope he feels better, I like the name
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and cool claymation? Inn Portland here we have Will Vinton Studios have you ever heard of him? http://www.vinton.com/ Rita, I do a website for a vet and he is a specialist in allergies for animals also.Has your pet been tested?If you wanted to email him and ask him a question on this, I amm sure you could do that and tell him Shawn Eric sent you he might be able to help. His email is at the bottom of the page there. http://www.amcwoodburn.com/
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How can an animal have IBS? Seems like Rome Critieria could not be met since the symptoms necessary basically have to be reported. I guess you could see pain on your animal's face which is relieved by going to the bathroom. Strange, though. Would toss all the theories about antibiotics and modern life causing IBS out the door.
Backfire, the vets diagnose this as such, when an animal has digestive system problems, that cannot be explained through testing.They can give mice IBS also so you know. Animal studies play an important role in IBS research.I don't think they use the rome criteria though.
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They usally go by symptoms and the patients complaints. LOLButCan J Gastroenterol. 1999 Mar;13 Suppl A:47A-49A. Related Articles, Links Stress, inflammation and the irritable bowel syndrome.Collins SM, Barbara G, Vallance B.Division of Gastroenterology, Intestinal Diseases Research Program, Faculty of Health Sciences and The Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.Studies in animals have shown that inflammation of the mucosa of the gastrointestinal tract is accompanied by changes in enteric nerve and smooth muscle function, and in gut motility and sensation. In some instances, these changes persist long after resolution of the mucosal inflammation. Some of these observations have been made in human studies of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in patients after an enteric infection or in patients in remission from ulcerative colitis. Stress has also been implicated as a modulator of gastrointestinal inflammation in both animal and human studies. In animals, stress causes a reactivation of previous enteric inflammation and induces the attendant physiological changes. Prior stress also enhances the response to subsequent inflammatory stimuli. In humans, postinfectious IBS tends to occur in patients with psychological profiles similar to those observed in IBS patients and in whom there is a higher incidence of stressful life events just before exposure to the infection. Taken together, these observations link stress and inflammation as a putative pathogenetic mechanism in at least a subset of IBS patients.Publication Types: Review Review, Tutorial PMID: 10202209
Backfire, have you ever read this? http://www-fhs.mcmaster.ca/idrp/leading.htm
Backfire, dont' get Eric started........or at least scroll down so you don't get roped in.Any animal can get IBS with the problems with all the food supplies now days. Unless you buy strickly organic and you know for sure they are getting purified water.......and watch those antibiotics from the doctors for various things; can we go back a few years and know what we know now ??
Foods don't cause IBS, they have known that for quite a while now!!!IBS was on the planet before antibiotics since they first discover them in 1929 and it was not until the forties they started to be used.There is also clear evidence on why some people get IBS that has nothing to do with them.They also "revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases." However as with all things they should be used only when needed.Frank, IBS is not contagious and you can not get it from animals."One in five Canadians suffers from chronic gastrointestinal problems. Its inoffensive name doesn't convey the sheer misery of its symptoms: severe cramps, bloating and gas, interspersed with bouts of diarrhea, constipation, or both. Adding to the problem is the fact that many people find it so embarrassing to talk about that they won't seek medical attention."The prevalence of gastrointestinal problems is underestimated," points out Dr. Stephen Collins, chief of gastroenterology at McMaster University. "While 20 percent of the population experience the pain, constipation or diarrhea of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) at some point in their lives, only a relatively small proportion will seek medical attention. The rest will either suffer in silence or take over-the-counter medication."Although some of the symptoms may be similar, gastrointestinal disorders fall into a number of broad categories. One of the most chronic and disabling (at times, even life-threatening) is Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), a class of disorders that includes Crohn's disease, ileitis and colitis. Unlike some forms of gastrointestinal disorders, inflammation and/or ulceration of the intestines is dearly visible in IBD.For years, doctors and patients have debated the relationship between IBD and stress. In fact, some forms of IBD were originally thought to be psychosomatic."Every disease on the planet, from malignancy to heart disease, gets worse at times of stress," notes Dr. Collins. "That tendency is magnified several-fold when it comes to the gastrointestinal tract because of its special relationship to the brain." Second only to that organ in the number of nerves it contains, the, gut "has a very intricate and very broad circuitry that connects it to the day-today, minute-to-minute functions of the brain."Research by Dr. Collins and his team suggests that the stress/IBD relationship is very real. In one experiment, for example, researchers induced IBD in mice and then allowed them to recover. The animals remained free of the disease - until researchers subjected them to stress. In another experiment, cells from mice with a form of IBD were placed in the gut of mice without the disease. Again, the recipient animals remained disease-free - until they were stressed. At that point, the disease appeared like magic. These results strongly suggest that stress interacts with inflammation to trigger the symptoms of IBD.The evidence of this mind/body interaction was so compelling that Dr. Collins wondered if something similar was happening in patients with another form of gastrointestinal disorder: Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Unlike Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), structural changes in the bowel (such as inflammation or ulceration) are not visible in Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). But the same relationship between stress and symptom flare-up is found in IBS. Could stress be interacting with some as yet unseen, low-grade inflammation to produce the miserable symptoms of IBS?In a collaboration with British researchers, Dr. Collins and other McMaster scientists studied a food poisoning outbreak in Yorkshire, England. They discovered that between 27 and 30 percent of those who were infected subsequently developed IBS. Subsequent research has since confirmed that an enteric infection seems to be the most significant predictor of IBS.Of course, not every person who has food poisoning ends up with IBS. In the Yorkshire study, it was found that those who had long, severe bouts of diarrhea were more likely to develop IBS than those who'd been equally affected with vomiting. Women were found to be more susceptible than men. But stress emerged as the key indicator of IBS. Patients who had had significant stressors in their lives in the six months prior to their bout of food poisoning were the most likely to develop IBS.These and other studies have led to a new theory of IBS. In some patients, IBS appears to be a low-grade inflammation of the gut that is invisible to the naked eye. Under the right conditions - such as stress - chemicals are released that alter the functioning of the gut and trigger the symptoms of abdominal pain, constipation and/or diarrhea.This new understanding of IBS opens a fresh treatment possibility: using antibiotics to treat the gut inflammation and nip IBS in the proverbial bud. With a group of researchers in Nottingham, England, Dr. Collins and his colleagues are treating patients who have had a recent bout of gut infection with drugs that attack the inflammation. By the end of the study, they should know whether this treatment can prevent the development of IBS.This new approach has borne preliminary fruit, at least, in a much more serious gastrointestinal problem called pseudoobstruction syndrome. In this condition, the nerves and muscles that propel food through the gut weaken and eventually fail, producing the symptoms of a bowel blockage even though there is no physical obstruction. If the problem does not resolve by itself, patients face the grim prospect of a lifetime of intravenous feedings.As appears to be the case with lBS, gastrointestinal infection may be the trigger in a number of patients with pseudoobstruction. Researchers believe the culprit is either a viral infection or (prompted by a virus) the patient's own immune system that attacks the cells which move the muscles in the bowel. In carefully selected patients, Dr. Collins and others have begun to treat the infection with drugs. Thus far, only one McMaster patient has met the stringent study criteria - an otherwise outstandingly healthy young woman. A year prior to her illness, she had a viral infection and a sample of cells from her bowel revealed inflammatory cells deep within the tissue. After treatment with corticosteroids there was a dramatic change in her condition. Despite pessimistic prognoses from American specialists, her symptoms reversed themselves and she returned to leading a normal life."It's just one case," emphasizes Dr. Collins, "but it gives us hope that we will be able to do something for this very severe medical problem." Additional developments at McMaster are giving new hope to patients with other forms of gastrointestinal problems. One example is gastroparesis, a condition in which the mechanism that empties the stomach becomes disordered. Patients with a severe form of the disease (which is often a complication of nerve damage caused by diabetes) struggle with constant nausea and may vomit several times a day."This is a very significant problem in a small subset of patients," explains Dr. Gervais Tougas, an associate professor and researcher at McMaster.In a very small number of patients, Dr. Tougas and Dr. Jan Huizinga, a professor of biomedical sciences at McMaster, have used an invasive experimental treatment analogous to the artificial pacemaker for the heart. A small electric current is run through wires in the stomach to trigger the muscles to contract. Although the mechanism is still uncertain and patients must be selected carefully, between 75 and 90 percent of the patients treated with this therapy have experienced significant relief of their nausea. The hope is that as the technology becomes refined, doctors may be able to help more people with this disorder.But it is Dr Tougas' work with another electrical technology using electrodes on the surface of the brain to "map" its response when the gut is stimulated - that may eventually have the greatest impact by redefining what we know about the brain/gut relationship."One of our hypotheses is that in some patients, changes in pathways in the brain affect the way we sense things in the gut," he says. Using EEG technology, Tougas has discovered that after a painful stimulus the brain can become "trained" to respond to other, less intense, stimuli as pain. In other words, the brain interprets signals from the gut - even signals that are not the result of pain stimuli - as though they arc pain. This problem in perception may help to explain a number of upper and lower gastrointestinal conditions, including esophageal pain that resembles heart attack. Traditionally it was thought that many of these patients were simply more "vigilant" - they paid more attention and so felt more pain. But according to Dr Tougas, the problem is not one of vigilance but of how the brain perceives the signals from the nerves in the gut.Scientists such as Dr. Collins and Tougas are optimistic that the wealth of new discoveries will soon result in treatments that strike the cause, and not just the symptoms, of gastrointestinal disorders. More than ever, it is time for Canadians with gastrointestinal distress to openly talk with their doctors and get the medical attention they need." http://www-fhs.mcmaster.ca/idrp/leading.htm
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See DaisyP? I didn't get eric started, you did! And I hadn't read that article yet, eric. Thanks. Of course, you don't have to convince me of the stress/IBS connection. However, the idea that stress+infection creates an inflammation in the intestines is an interesting concept. We'll see if his studies show that when they are complete. That would fit my profile exactly. I was under an immense amount of stress prior to and at the same time that I had salmonella. That is what started the IBS. Let's see if studies can figure out a way to reverse the problem, if that is indeed what caused it (in my case, at least). And I wonder how frequent IBS really was before 1929. Here's a possible theory: before 1929 there actually was not IBS, but things that are generally confused with IBS (lactose intolerance, fructose intolerance, stress induced D/C, bile salt D, etc). Don't forget that in 1929 society's answer for mental problems was to not talk about it or lock you away. Not sure you can really rule out antibiotics, or over use of them.
Backfire,"HISTORICAL PRECEDENTSHistorians and physicians have documented the presence of Functional GI disorders throughout recorded human history. However, until recently, limited attention has been granted to these disorders due to the lack of identifiable pathology and the absence of a conceptual framework to understand and categorize them. Systematic investigation of functional GI disorders did not begin until the middle of the 20th century, and prior to this time, only occasional reports of functional GI symptoms were published, the first appearing only 200 years ago. " http://www.med.unc.edu/wrkunits/2depts/med...aldisorders.htm And if you look into the HPA axis and IBS and the fight or flight and homeostasis.Chronic stress can degranulate mast cells without a pathogen."J Neuroimmunol. 2004 Jan;146(1-2):1-12. Related Articles, Links Critical role of mast cells in inflammatory diseases and the effect of acute stress.Theoharides TC, Cochrane DE.Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Tufts-New England Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA. theoharis.theoharides###tufts.eduMast cells are not only necessary for allergic reactions, but recent findings indicate that they are also involved in a variety of neuroinflammatory diseases, especially those worsened by stress. In these cases, mast cells appear to be activated through their Fc receptors by immunoglobulins other than IgE, as well as by anaphylatoxins, neuropeptides and cytokines to secrete mediators selectively without overt degranulation. These facts can help us better understand a variety of sterile inflammatory conditions, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), migraines, inflammatory arthritis, atopic dermatitis, coronary inflammation, interstitial cystitis and irritable bowel syndrome, in which mast cells are activated without allergic degranulation."Mast cells are close to the smooth muscle and release toxins onto the nerves and that maybe in part the pain in IBS.There is a ton of work done on this and there is a problem in IBSInflammatory Mediators in Irritable Bowel Syndrome http://www.med.unc.edu/wrkunits/2depts/med...rymediators.htm There are increases seen in IBS patients of mast cells and EC cells that store serotonin.This is a bigger picture of the whole mess.http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=bloa...149D7A767&c=482 &yc=15315&icp=1[/URL]
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None of that really specifically addresses my hypothesis. First, the website you directed me to is just conclusory. But even if I take it as proven that doctors can document IBS symptoms in the past, unless doctors in those eras were ruling out systematically other gastrointestinal problems like those I mentioned before (and I'm not even sure medicine had advanced as much to really understand other possible diagnosis that could mimic current IBS symptoms), it doesn't refute my hypothesis at all. If it is proveable that IBS was present before antibiotics, there would have to be proof on several different issues:1) That other disorders with symptoms similar to IBS were understood enough such that they could have been diagnosed2) That stress induced diarrhea/constipation and other mental problems were not only understood, but considered alongside other gastro problems in the regular course of treatment.3) That for stress induced D/C, patients did not undereport the mental aspects of their problems.4) That with all of the above, a substantial amount of patients still experienced symptoms associated with IBS in the same rate as they do currently. I don't think it is possible to prove it really because I don't think data exists to support the points above. That doesn't mean that antibiotics has anything to do with IBS; but it does mean that you can't rule that out completely (maybe to a good degree considering what we know about antibiotics, but not completely).
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