Overcoming the Pain of IBS

LOS ANGELES (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- It's painful, chronic, and common. As many as one in five Americans suffers from irritable bowel syndrome. IBS has stumped doctors for years, but they now believe the pain may be caused by a glitch in the brain.

Food for lunch. Believe it or not, that's a good day for Jae Brodsky. A bad day?

"You get up in the morning and the stomach says, 'I don't want food anymore. No solid food,'" Brodsky says.

So it's tea and broth for days at a time. Cramping, nausea, and a constant urge to use the bathroom -- sometimes ten times an hour -- strike without warning.

"It's the uncertainty in the sense that you just never know when you're going to be sick," Brodsky says. "Everywhere you go, anything you do, you just always have to watch out and have a plan for what happens if you get sick."

More than anything, IBS is painful. But that pain could be in their head -- literally! The way most of us deal with pain is controlled like the volume on your TV. If it's pain that will benefit you -- like a shot -- we turn the volume down. But if it seems dangerous -- like being burned by a hot stove -- we "turn-up" the volume to react faster.

"The brain wants to do the opposite thing. It wants to maximize the gain to detect it as quickly as possible. Is this going to be something dangerous or not," says Emeran Mayer, M.D., a gastroenterologist and neuroscientist at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif.

UCLA researchers found a malfunction in the brains of women with IBS -- they can't turn down the volume, making them hypersensitive to even mild discomfort.

"To me, it makes a lot of sense. It's one of the things that really happens. You feel everything very intensely, including the pain," Brodsky says.

Doctors say you can re-train the brain to turn down those pain circuits, providing some relief. But the cause of the disease still stumps them. Until then, Brodsky's back-up plan includes a bathroom nearby.

Dr. Mayer emphasizes IBS is not just a psychological condition. However, there is a strong brain-gut component. IBS often follows an infectious illness, causing lasting inflammation and digestive enzymes.

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