Colitis

Ulcerative Colitis

Clitis and Crohn's disease are similar — so similar that they're often mistaken for one another. Both inflame the lining of your digestive tract, and both can cause severe bouts of watery or bloody diarrhea and abdominal pain. But ulcerative colitis usually affects only the innermost lining of your large intestine (colon) and rectum. Crohn's disease, on the other hand, can occur anywhere in your digestive tract, often spreading deep into the layers of affected tissues.

Sign & Symptoms

Signs and symptoms of colitis include pain, tenderness in the abdomen, fever, swelling of the colon tissue, bleeding, erythema (redness) of the surface of the colon, rectal bleeding, and ulcerations of the colon. Tests that show these signs are plain X-rays of the colon, testing the stool for blood and pus, and colonoscopy. Additional tests include stool cultures and blood tests such as a complete blood count, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and blood chemistry tests.

Types of Colitis

Several types of colitis, including ulcerative colitis, Crohn's Disease, ischemic colitis, infectious colitis, and atypical colitis.

A well known subtype of infectious colitis is pseudomembranous colitis, resulting from infection by a toxigenic strain of Clostridium difficile. Parasitic infections can also cause colitis.

Any colitis which has a rapid downhill clinical course is known as fulminant colitis. In addition to the diarrhea, fever, and anemia seen in colitis, the patient has severe abdominal pain and a clinical picture similar to septicemia with shock is present. Approximatly half of those patients require surgery.

Irritable bowel syndrome is separate disease which has been called spastic colitis. This name causes confusion since colitis is not a feature of irritable bowel syndrome.

Autistic enterocolitis is a disputed medical entity but refers to a type of colitis found in patients with autism.

Causes

No one is quite sure what triggers ulcerative colitis, but there's a consensus as to what doesn't. Researchers no longer believe that stress is the main culprit, although stress can often aggravate symptoms. Instead, current thinking focuses on the following possibilities:

Immune system. Some scientists think a virus or bacterium may cause ulcerative colitis. The digestive tract becomes inflamed when the body's immune system tries to fight off the invading microorganism. It's also possible that inflammation may stem from the virus or bacterium itself.

Other possibel factors include heredity, envirement & Antibiotics

Treatment

Treatment includes anti-inflammatory drugs, Fish oil, Immune system suppressors, Nicotine patches. New drug treatments are on the horizon. In severe cases surgery may be recommended.