Stress And Crohn's Disease

While stress does not cause Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, these conditions do cause stress for patients and their families. Coping with the pain and fatigue, as well as complicated decisions about treatment, clearly can be stressful, but some of the strongest sources of stress for people with IBD are less obvious.

 

Patient perception of the role of stress is also split. About 1 in 3 people with IBD believe that stress or psychological factors had something to do with getting the illness in the first place. About 3 in 4 people believe that stress affects the course of their disease.

 

In determining if stress is a factor in your IBD, try to distinguish between experiencing common gut symptoms and active inflammation (a flare of disease). An increase in symptoms does not always mean that the intestine is inflamed. You can experience increased fatigue, pain, or diarrhea for many reasons other than IBD. In fact, these symptoms of an irritable bowel are quite common in IBD even when there is no active inflammation. There is some evidence that once a person's bowel has been affected by repeated occurrences of inflammation and healing, it is more likely to respond to stress with diarrhea and pain, even if a flare of inflammation doesn't occur.

 

Until there is better evidence upon which to base decisions, the best policy seems to be to know yourself and trust your experience. If you believe from your own experience with IBD that the stresses in your life (or the way that you react to them) have an impact on your symptoms, then it makes sense to try to modify the ways that you respond to stress. If your experience is that your disease course doesn't seem to depend on what is happening in your life, then you are probably right.