Can IBS lead to other health problems?

Can IBS lead to other health problems?

Lin Chang (UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases) gives expert video advice on: Can IBS cause weight gain or weight loss?; Is IBS painful?; Can IBS damage the colon or other parts of the digestive system? and more...

If a patient has very severe symptoms and it's impacting their quality of life, you can just imagine that they're going to feel some distress about that, and a lot of patients will say, "Well, I didn't really have depression, or my mood wasn't really bad before, it's just that I feel so impaired in my life." They can have lower self esteem, and it really affects their functioning in that way, and also IBS is associated with non-gastrointestinal symptoms. Now whether those occur at the same time or with just greater severity or acceleration of IBS developing, but for example, one very common symptom is fatigue. Another common symptom is sleep disturbances, there are patients that do not sleep well, and if you don't sleep well, which is a time the body restores itself, it's associated worse with bowel symptoms the next day, and that's actually has been shown in studies.The other aspect of IBS, is that it coexists with other conditions, where you have symptoms that are outside of the GI tract, so if Fibromyalgia which is a chronic pain condition of the muscles, patients have chronic muscles pain and chronic back pain, and so even though that's outside the GI tract, they can develop other conditions, IBS patients can develop other conditions where they will have other symptoms, and a patient who becomes more severe they will tend to have more of these non-gastrointestinal symptoms, either related to a diagnosable medical condition like migraine headaches or Fibromyalgia, sometimes it's not.