VIDEO: Treating comorbid conditions important in IBS-C, CIC

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

There are lots of challenges associated with treating patients with functional GI disorders. And all of you that take care of patients on a regular basis know that these patients have a multitude of symptoms. They don't just come in with one set of symptoms, even based on what the Rome criteria shows us how we make the diagnosis. They also tend to have bloating and crampiness, and upper GI symptoms, and they also tend to have a lot of comorbid conditions as well. So, anxiety, depression, chronic headaches, all these factors can contribute to it. And so we treat their bowel functional alone, these other symptoms may then predominate, if they weren't predominant before, and again, it may impair our ability to improve the overall quality of life and the satisfaction of our patients. So these are challenges, and for patients with a lot of these comorbid conditions, it really is a teamwork approach. We need a multidisciplinary approach to treating those patients, and I think that's where we have our best chance of having improvements.