Reported by Martha Benavides
It’s painful, chronic, and common.
As many as one in five Americans suffers from irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. The syndrome has stumped doctors for years.
But as we learn in Monday’s Medical Breakthroughs, they now believe the pain may be caused by a glitch in the brain.
Jae Brodsky said just being able to eat lunch without getting abdominal pains is a good day for her.
“You get up in the morning and the stomach says, ‘I don’t want food anymore,’…no solid food,” she said. So it’s tea and broth for days at a time.
Brodsky said 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,” she said. “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 literally be in their head
The way most of us deal with pain is controlled like the volume on your television.
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,” said gastroenterologist Dr. Emeran Mayer. “It wants to maximize the gain to detect it as quickly as possible. Is this going to be something dangerous or not?”
Mayer and other researchers at the University of California - Los Angeles found a malfunction in the brains of women with IBS.
Their brains can’t “turn down the volume”, making them hypersensitive to even mild discomfort.
“To me, it makes a lot of sense,” Brodsky said. “It’s one of the things that really happens. You feel everything very intensely, including the pain.”
Doctors say patients can retrain the brain to turn down those pain circuits, providing some relief.
But the cause of irritable bowel syndrome still stumps them.
Until then, Jae’s back-up plan includes keeping a bathroom nearby.