Crohn's disease can sometimes be difficult to diagnose because it can have similar symptoms to lots of other conditions. A GP can check for any obvious causes of your symptoms and refer you for more tests if needed.
Symptoms of Crohn's include stomach pain, fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting, so doctors may mistake it for other conditions. Tests that show inflammation or its damage, like lesions, can reveal the right diagnosis.
Mild Crohn's disease causes inflammation through the digestive system. At this stage of the disease, symptoms remain less severe and are more easily managed. Symptoms of mild Crohn's disease include abdominal pain, diarrhea, gas, and bloating.
DB Silent disease is disease that does not have the overt symptoms that make a patient feel poorly. This is a fairly well-established concept in medicine. Perhaps the best example of a correlate to silent Crohn's disease is silent ischemia in the context of heart disease.
Crohn's disease is a long-term condition that causes inflammation of the lining of the digestive system. Inflammation can affect any part of the digestive system, from the mouth to the back passage. But it mostly occurs in the last section of the small intestine (ileum) or the large intestine (colon).
It may go undiagnosed for years, because symptoms usually develop gradually and it doesn't always affect the same part of the intestine. Other diseases can have the same symptoms as Crohn's disease. But doctors can diagnose Crohn's by doing a test that looks at the inside of the intestine and doing a biopsy.
Do You Poop a Lot With Crohn's? Some people who have Crohn's disease will go to the bathroom more often than people who don't live with a digestive disease. In severe Crohn's disease, diarrhea could occur many times a day. For some people with Crohn's disease, stools are infrequent.
The pain that Crohn's patients feel tends to be crampy. It often appears in the lower right abdomen but can happen anywhere along the digestive tract. “It depends on where that inflammatory process is happening,” says Nana Bernasko, DNP, gastroenterology expert with the American Gastroenterological Association.
Most commonly, Crohn's affects your small intestine and the beginning of your large intestine. However, the disease can affect any part of your digestive tract, from your mouth to your anus. Learn more about your digestive system and how it works. Crohn's disease is an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Crohn's disease can sometimes be difficult to diagnose because it can have similar symptoms to lots of other conditions. A GP can check for any obvious causes of your symptoms and refer you for more tests if needed.
Gastroenterologists almost always recommend a colonoscopy to diagnose Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. This test provides live video images of the colon and rectum and enables the doctor to examine the intestinal lining for inflammation, ulcers, and other signs of IBD.
At present, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis cannot be diagnosed through simple blood tests. However, blood tests are still very important as they may be supportive of the diagnosis and can also be used to monitor the activity of your disease.
Stool (poo) tests
Ask your GP to test your poo for Faecal Calprotectin. A Faecal Calprotectin test can show whether you have inflammation in your gut, which would be a sign that you may have Crohn's or Colitis.
IBD is a lifelong (chronic) condition. A few patients find their disease becomes milder (“burned out”) after age 60, but many do not.
The CalproSmart self-test is a rapid test for distant monitoring of patients with established chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease. Being a pro-active test, the patient will perform the Calprotectin test at home with regular intervals or at their own discretion.
Almost one-third (1/3) of people with Crohn's disease are overweight and about 1 out of 12 is actually obese. On the other hand, shows that those with Crohn's disease tend to be underweight with a lower body mass index (BMI)(Sousa Guerreiro and others, American J Gastroenterology 2007).
But Crohn's disease doesn't always cause weight loss. Sometimes, it causes the scale to go up. One study found that 40 percent of people with Crohn's had a body mass index in the overweight or obese range. It's not clear exactly why some people gain weight with Crohn's, but there are a number of possible causes.
A Crohn's flare usually involves diarrhea, often with mucus and sometimes with blood. Many people also have low-grade fevers. Other symptoms, which range from mild to severe, may include: Abdominal pain or cramps.