12/3/2023 0 Comments Treatment for ibsAnd that's why we recommend routine colonoscopies, passing the scope up into the colon, looking for those early changes associated with cancer. That's why it's a good idea to maintain close contact with your treatment team. And that comes, we believe, from the chronic inflammation of the colon. The main risk factor for cancer would be colorectal or cancer of the large bowel. Is there any cancer risk from having IBD? Another way diet can impact the disease is if you have damage of the small bowel, that can impact your ability to do certain types of functions in the small bowel - like absorbing dairy products, for example. If one has a narrowing in the small bowel related to Crohn's disease, something called a stricture, diet becomes very important because if certain patients eat foods that have too much roughage or fiber, then those types of foods can cause an impaction or block the narrowing in the small bowel, leading to signs and symptoms of something we call an obstruction: Belly pain, vomiting, loud noises in the bowel. There's multiple lines of research that when patients with inflammatory bowel disease are controlled against patients their same age, with their same medical problems, without inflammatory bowel disease, achieve roughly the same lifespan. And the immune system is what is actually causing the chronic inflammation that's present in the intestine that we prescribe medications to treat. And then the third component is these two things impact on the immune system. So most people have the right genetic makeup for this disease but don't actually develop the disease. The genetics of inflammatory bowel disease is complicated and actually quite widespread. The second most important thing is having the right genes. It may be a particular bug that lives in the bowel, or may be a function of that bug, which is also a function of the diet. That environmental insult may be dietary. Most of us believe that there's some environmental insult that leads to the chronic inflammation in the intestine. Most of us that are involved in the research of this condition would suggest that there's three major causes that we study for this condition. But if you do those three things, I think that most practitioners would tell you, we'd rather you not be thinking about your inflammatory bowel disease. You'll need to keep in touch with your treatment team and you'll need to take medications as they've been prescribed. So I think the biggest ways that the disease is going to affect your life is perhaps you may need to watch a bit what you eat. I think for the vast majority of patients that we see, the appropriate medical plan can keep patients generally free of symptoms over the order of one to three years. But what we really care about is quality of life. It's been well studied that actually inflammatory bowel disease does not significantly change the overall lifespan of the patients. Every practitioner will tell you that in an ideal world, it shouldn't affect your life at all. Faubion, Jr., M.D., Gastroenterology, Mayo Clinic: I think most simply, it depends on where in the bowel the disease is affecting and how severe your case is.
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