08 Aug Information About Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

What is IBS?

IBS is a group of symptoms that occur together, including repeated pain in your abdomen and changes in your bowel movements, which may be diarrhea, constipation, or both. With IBS, you have these symptoms without any visible signs of damage or disease in your digestive tract.

Treatment for IBS:

Your physician may recommend medications or changes in what you eat and other lifestyle changes or both to help treat IBS.  You may have to try a few treatments to see what works best for you. 

Recent Data:

A study presented at Digestive Disease Week 2022 looked at ~300 adults with IBS.  The adults were divided into 3 treatment categories for 4 weeks:

• a diet with low total carbohydrate content 
• a diet combining low-fermentable oligo-, di- and monosaccharides and polyols (low FODMAP) 
• an optimized medication treatment plan

Food was delivered to patients weekly in the dietary intervention groups. IBS symptom severity was assessed before and after the 4-week intervention period.

All three treatment groups had reduced symptom severity after the 4 weeks, but the two dietary treatment groups had a greater positive change in symptoms compared to the medication treatment group. Both the low carbohydrate content diet and low FODMAP diet proved equally effective in reducing symptoms.

Dietary therapy for IBS is a very effective treatment.  Speak to your physician about dietary therapy to treat your IBS!

Source: Nybacka S, Törnblom H, Josefsson A, et al. Both a low carbohydrate diet and a combined low FODMAP/traditional IBS diet are superior to optimized medical treatment in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): a randomized controlled trial. Presented at: DDW 2022; May 21-24, 2022; San Diego, CA. Abstract 684.