It's a pain in the backside!

It does not, as the name suggests, affect only the bowel, but the whole digestive system. Primary symptoms are diarrhoea, constipation, gastric reflux, excess wind, indigestion, stomach cramps, nausea or any combination thereof. This is a personal account of the illness:

Unfortunately, as this syndrome [IBS is a syndrome rather than a disease. A syndrome is a collection of symptoms (things people complain of) or signs (which can be physical, mental, radiological or biochemical, etc) which can be caused by a disease or diseases. A disease is usually regarded as a single pathology which may be caused by an organism, dysfunction or genetic problem. A single disease cannot always be implicated in many of the known syndromes such as in IBS. ] has such wide-ranging symptoms, many non-specific digestive ailments tends to get labelled as IBS, and many more serious illnesses get overlooked . The consequences of this can be devastating: a friend of mine died of stomach cancer that was originally misdiagnosed as IBS.

The causes of the syndrome are unknown. It is very obvious that stress has an effect on the severity of attacks but whether it is causal I do not