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."
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