Living With Crohns Disease

When the body cannot efficiently take in nutrients from the food you digest, you don’t receive the nourishment you need from eating. Minor to severe malabsorption can occur in patients with Crohn’s disease because the intestinal tissue normally responsible for absorbing nutrients is inflamed and doesn’t do its job effectively.

Malabsorption leads to malnourishment, which can cause a host of other complications of which weight loss is only the beginning. Malnourishment opens up the doors for endless problems.

Think of your body as a business, with food as its customers. It opens its doors and lets in customers that fuel the business.

Malabsorption is like having lots of customers who never buy anything. They go into the business, look around, and then leave. When the body doesn’t get the fuel it needs to keep going it has no choice but to shut down!

No matter how much you eat, if you’re suffering from extreme malnourishment it’s almost like you’ve eaten nothing at all.

The only way to treat malabsorption is to get the digestive tract back into a healthy enough state that it can start digesting food again. This is most commonly done with medicinal treatment - corticosteroids to quickly reduce inflammation and then some type of maintenance drug to keep the inflammation down.

Since Crohn’s disease affects all layers of the bowel, a condition can occur where inflammation causes pouches to develop on the exterior of the colon. This precursor to diverticulitis is known as diverticulosis; it develops into the former when one or more of these pouches becomes infected.

Diverticulitis is thought to be caused by a lack of fiber in the diet, and since low-fiber diets are a commonly recommended treatment for Crohn’s patients, the risk of diverticular disease can be heightened.

Surgery may be necessary to remove the infected pouch(es), but in many cases diverticulitis is treated similarly to Crohn’s itself, with low-fiber diets or limited food taken by mouth to rest the gut and allow it time to heal.

After the condition is believed to have been relieved, the usual course of action is to put the patient on a high-fiber diet as this is believed to be a measure of prevention against recurrence. A Crohn’s sufferer, however, does not always have so straightforward a solution.

A good way for Crohn’s patients to avoid diverticular disease is to keep a limited amount of fiber in their diet by eating cooked vegetables and fruits, although the benefits of this course of action varies from patient to patient and should of course be discussed with your doctor first.

Anemia is a condition where a low red blood cell count results in the cells of the body not receiving the proper amount of oxygen. It can cause tiredness and a feeling of lethargy, even after a full night’s sleep.

In Crohn’s disease, the body commonly loses blood through the digestive tract, where bleeding caused by inflammation can be significant enough to lower the patient’s red blood cell count.

This specific condition is called pernicious anemia, and is characterized by vitamin B-12 deficiency caused by gastritis, or inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract.

Someone suffering from any type of anemia is said to be anemic.

Severe anemia can bring on other complications, including heart palpitations and irregular heartbeat, among others.

Anemia can be treated with iron, which promotes the formation of new red blood cells in the body. Amounts of iron in the body must be brought up to normal levels within the body, which can be done with supplements or by eating foods high in iron.

Consumption of foods high in iron is the most natural way to receive the nutrient, so eating foods like beef, liver, and spinach can help to immediately boost levels.

Iron pill supplements may work as well, but they are believed by some to be harsh on the system and somewhat difficult to absorb, so for a Crohn’s patient who may already be having difficulty digesting certain things, these supplements might be less effective than simply eating high-iron foods.

It can be pretty scary to look down into the toilet and see blood, especially if there’s a lot of it. Rectal bleeding is a common symptom of Crohn’s disease and the amounts of bright red blood that can appear in the stool are sometimes quite alarming.

This symptom of Crohn’s disease is the cause of many other complications associated with the condition, including lack of nutrients and low red blood cell count leading to iron deficiency and anemia.

Bleeding may occur sporadically or seem to have no rhyme or reason, but its presence signals the effects of inflammation in the gut. Amount and frequency of blood may be related to the ingestion of foods high in fiber, but there are also some who believe that foods with high amounts of sugar and complex carbohydrates can play a role as well.

Eating foods that are not on the normal diet of the individual, such as going out to eat at a restaurant and trying something not commonly eaten, may have an effect on the bowel and thus result in rectal bleeding.