As in most syndromes, the irritable bowel syndrome is made up of different signs and symptoms. IBS has not been shown to lead to serious disease, like cancer. Over time, other terminologies have also been developed for IBS, for example colitis, mucous colitis, spastic colon, or spastic bowel. However, no link has been established between IBS and inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.
When a patient has really severe symptoms and it is affecting their way of life, you can just contemplate that they are going to feel some stress about that, and a lot of patients will say, “Well, I did not genuinely have depression, or my mood wasn’t really bad before, it’s merely that I feel so impaired in my life.” You can find many of them saying that while they did not have depression or mood swings before; their decreased functionality has made them feel helpless.
Irritable bowel syndrome can also be complicated by non-gastrointestinal symptoms, taking place simultaneously or accelerated due to IBS. Fatigue is one of the usual manifestations of irritable bowel syndrome. Difficulty in sleeping is another. There are patients who do not sleep well, and if you do not sleep well, which is a time for the body to restore itself, it can lead to worse bowel symptoms the next day, and that actually has been shown in studies.
Irritable bowel syndrome is also known to present itself with various other conditions, especially when the symptoms exist outside of the gastrointestinal tract. One example is fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by chronic pain of the muscles. Some patients develop chronic muscle pain and chronic back pain due to irritable bowel syndrome, and this condition is outside the GI tract. Those suffering from IBS have a tendency to develop other symptoms related to it, and the more serious the condition of the patient, the higher the chances that he will acquire other non gastro-intestinal symptoms, including fibromyalgia, and other treatable medical conditions as migraine headaches.
Irritable bowel syndrome can also be strongly associated with leaky gut syndrome and gut dysbiosis, in the form of small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Other than that, IBS may also be linked to various environmental illnesses. IBS is sometimes diagnosed in people who have also been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), Gulf war syndrome (GWS) and autism. Recent research has looked into this relationship and begun to discover possible reasons why IBS so frequently goes hand in hand with these other chronic illnesses.
Much of the research made has been focused on the connection of SIBO in most of these conditions, particularly in CFS and fibromyalgia. Just as SIBO has been found to be common in IBS patients, recent research has also found this to be the case with fibromyalgia and CFS. Research indicates that SIBO I present in those suffering from either IBS or fibromyalgia.
Interestingly, they found that SIBO appears to be worse in fibromyalgia patients and the severity of the SIBO in individual patients correlated strongly with the intensity of the pain they experienced. To speculate on this research, could it be possible that if the SIBO of those with only IBS were to get worse, they too would experience fibromyalgic pain? More studies would have to be done to come up with conclusive answers.
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