| Living with Crohn's Disease* |
| Written by Henry Johnson | |
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What a nightmare! You have trouble going to the bathroom; in fact, your stool is bloody and you have fistulas in the bladder, skin and vagina. Your joints are so inflamed that you feel as if you have arthritis. Your eyes are getting sores. If you are a child, you've stopped growing and your sexual development seems to have slowed down. And now, the doctor has mentioned that you have Vitamin B12 deficiency. What's going on? You probably have Crohn's disease, a chronic and untreatable condition characterized above all by the constant inflammation of the small intestine, bowel and colon. It comes and goes, with periods with few symptoms followed by flare-ups; for years you thought you were healthy again, but now all of a sudden, the symptoms are all back and they are extremely painful.What do you do? Start by opening that medicine chest and pulling out the pills you stopped taking. If they've expired, go to the doctor and get new prescriptions. Since Crohn's can come back to haunt you, it is essential to stay on medications long-term, so the disease symptoms have a more difficult time returning. Don't take Crohn's lightly. It is important to understand that people with Crohn's run a higher risk than others of getting small bowel and colon cancer. This only makes the need for constant and consistent treatment more acute. Take care of yourself as well as you can. People with Crohn’s disease often run the risk of malnutrition, because (1) they can lose their appetites, and (2) the food they do consume is lost to the body through diarrhea and poor absorption of nutrients from their thick, scarred intestinal walls. Although no one knows of a special diet that can help people with Crohn's, it is essential for people who suffer from this debilitating disease to eat nutritious food and avoid food that makes their symptoms worse. Vitamin supplements may help, but then again, they may not; before deciding to take them, it is important to seek a doctor's advice. Stay as calm as possible. Stress does not appear to cause Crohn’s disease, but the disease itself can create increased stress for people who have it, simply because it takes so much effort to live comfortably with a chronic disease. There is also some evidence that flare-ups -- sudden worsening of symptoms -- occur during times of life stress. In these cases, Crohn’s patients may benefit from stress reduction techniques, such as deep breathing, meditation, careful attention to diet, and plenty of sleep. If you want to have a baby, don’t let Crohn's stop you, but get yourself checked out by a doctor first. There is absolutely no evidence that women with Crohn's disease have any more trouble than others getting pregnant, staying healthy during pregnancy, or giving birth to healthy children. Nonetheless, the decision to have a baby should be discussed with a doctor before a woman with Crohn's actually gets pregnant. Although most children of women with Crohn's disease do not develop the disease themselves, there is clearly a genetic component to Crohn's, because the disease runs in families. Moreover, Crohn’s-disease children can suffer worse complications than adults with the disease. The side effects for children may include slowed growth and delayed sexual development. It is best to assess the risk of a child getting Crohn's before going ahead with the pregnancy. Explore your options for treatment, which may be getting better. One of the most promising avenues for traditional medical treatment is to participate in clinical trials of new medications designed to treat Crohn's Disease. Research into Crohn's falls under the purview of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which conducts and supports research into many kinds of digestive disorders. At any time, scientists affiliated with the NIDDK may be developing new treatments for the disease, and conducting clinical trials to find out if their treatments are both safe and effective at reducing Crohn's symptoms to a greater degree than existing treatments. The new treatments will only be made available to patients if they pass both the safety and the efficacy tests, but in order to determine whether the medications work, scientists must try them out on willing volunteers. Readers can find a list of all the trials that are currently being conducted with a visit to www.ClinicalTrials.gov. If clinical trials are a dead end, consider the alternatives. For starters, since it can be demoralizing to suffer through Crohn's alone, so why not join a support group? The Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America, at http://www.ccfa.org/chapters/, offers support groups throughout the United States. Try eating more fish oil, which appears to reduce the chance of flare-ups among people with a less severe form of Crohn's. Avoid milk products with lactose, because your small bowel disease may have made you lactose-intolerant. Variants of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, a diet low in foods that are likely to worsen the inflammation in your gut, will not cure the disease but they may improve your symptoms. You could also try a Low Residue Diet, which may reduce the amount of stool your body produces, and if your flare up is so painful that you cannot eat at all, your doctor may be able to help you obtain total parenteral nutrition (TPN) - a treatment containing only vitamins and nutrients. *This article is based on information provided at AARP Health Tools, Wikipedia and National Institutes of Health. |
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