To understand Pouchitis, you must first know how an ileal pocket works.
When other treatments cannot keep ulcerative colitis (UC) well controlled, your health care provider may recommend surgery called ileoanal anastomosis. In this procedure, a surgeon removes the rectum and the important intestine. They then use a small healthy intestine to create a J -shaped pocket connecting the small intestine to the anus.
As your day progresses, the excrement come together in this pocket. As you are full, you feel the desire to go to the toilet. Without article J, you would need to have an ileostomy (when the end of the small intestine is drawn through the skin of your abdomen) and collect liquid stools in a pocket of stoma.
Pochitis means that the J -shaped area is inflamed. “Inflammation of the ileal pocket (” J Pouchitis “) in patients with an inflammatory intestine disease [who have undergone ileoanal anastomatosis] Can be acute or chronic, ”explains Sandhya Shukla, MD, gastroenterologist in gastroenterological partners of the Atlantic coast in Brick Township, New Jersey.
Acute pochitis (short -term) can come and come, but over time, most of the cases of pochitis evolve in chronic (long -term) pochitis, which requires continuous treatment. If chronic pochitis does not improve with antibiotics or antibiotics worked in the past but I have no more help, it is called a chronic antibiotic pochitis.
Pochitis symptoms may include:
Lower abdominal pain
Intestinal cramps
Urgent soles
More frequent soles
Inability to hold in poop
Streck to poop pain or blockage
Have the impression that you need to poop but I can’t
Blood in the stool
Fever or thrill
“Patients often describe [pouchitis] As a “return of UC type symptoms” despite surgery, “said Ekta Gupta, MBBS, chief of gastroenterology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
“The American Gastroenterological Association underlines that these symptoms generally represent a change compared to the function of the basic pocket of the patient, which is generally four to eight stools per day and one to two per night after a postoperative adjustment,” explains Dr. Gupta.
Sometimes the symptoms are subtle and confused with other causes, including potential complications of pocket surgery in J such as cuffitis (inflammation of the rest rectal after Pochitis surgery), irritable pocket syndrome or bacterial proliferation, explains Gupta.
This is why it is important for doctors to use stool studies and pchoscopy (such as colonoscopy just for the pocket) if necessary to help establish a diagnosis and exclude other problems.