Are there risk factors for IBS?

Are there risk factors for IBS?

Lin Chang (UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases) gives expert video advice on: What causes IBS?; Can stress make IBS worse?; What can I tell people who insist my IBS is 'all in your head'? and more...

There are some risk factors and some of the risk factors include an infection. I think also having a family member, particularly a first degree family member with a condition. The other factors I thought to play a role, but I'm not sure I would term it a risk factor, is having chronic stress or having psychological distress in the form of anxiety or depression. Or this term called somatisation, where patients have different symptoms that are focused on different organ systems of the body. That probably predisposes them to a developing those symptoms. The other risk factor would be, if you have other chronic pain syndromes. Very often these chronic pain syndromes go hand in hand, so there are significant overlaps with IBS with migraine headache, with fibromyalgia, with introstiltialsistitis where patients have pain that's referable to their bladder. So those are conditions that if you have it, it's very often that you'll see IBS in those individuals.