As the name suggests, irritable bowel syndrome is a “syndrome”, that means it is a combination of signs and symptoms. ibs has not been shown to lead to serious disease, including cancer. Through the years, IBS has been called by many names, among them 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.
Patients who are suffering the most severe symptoms of IBS have found that the quality of their life has been severely affected as well. 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. Another common symptom is sleep disturbances. What makes it worse is that when patients do not sleep well, the body is unable to recharge and heal itself, thus leading to worse bowel symptoms the following day. There have been studies that attest to this.
The additional element of irritable bowel syndrome is the fact it coexists with other conditions, where you might have symptoms that are outside of the gastro-intestinal tract. Like fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition of the muscles. With most patients, the chronic muscle pain, which is obviously external of the GI tract, is actually developed due to IBS. 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.
IBS is also associated with two other conditions: the leaky gut syndrome and gut dysbiosis, where it can be manifested as a small intestine bacterial overgrowth or SIBO. There’s also connections between IBS and other environmental illnesses. IBS is frequently diagnosed in people who have also been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), Gulf war syndrome (GWS) and autism. Recent studies have looked into this connection and begun to discover attainable reasons why IBS so often 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. While it is known that SIBO is common among IBS patients, recent studies have also shown that the same holds true for those with CFS and fibromyalgia. Research indicates that SIBO I present in those suffering from either IBS or fibromyalgia.
Interestingly, they found that SIBO was worse in fibromyalgia patients and the severity of the SIBO in specific patients correlated strongly with the severity of the pain they experienced. Based on this finding, would it be possible to make speculations that if an IBS patient experienced severe SIBO he would also be developing fibromyalgic pain? Only further research can answer that question.