As people’s health awareness continues to rise, medical checkups are becoming more and more important, and people who have the means are often willing to spend a lot of money on medical checkups, doing expensive “big” tests such as MR and CT, but many people ignore some of the cheapest and most basic routine tests. For example, stool routine (or stool test) is a simple test often seen as “useless, do not want to do” test, but this simple test can give feedback to many digestive tract disease traces. In the medical examination, blood routine has become one of the indispensable items, people are more willing to accept the form of blood sampling, but stool routine is often abandoned, because the sampling is considered “troublesome”, “dirty”. Therefore, in many hospitals or medical checkup packages, there is no trace of stool routine, and very few people choose stool routine in medical checkups. Although the hospital attaches great importance to the stool routine, often guiding the units and individuals to do this project, but the number of people doing it is still far less than the blood routine. The reason for the lack of people asking for stool routine, mainly because it is too troublesome to take samples and simply do not do, or the awareness of the stool routine is still in the “is not to check for parasites? It doesn’t matter if you test it or not”. In fact, stool is the “alarm” for various digestive tract diseases. The color and shape of the stool is closely related to the disease: black stool may be upper gastrointestinal bleeding, dark red stool may be an intestinal ulcer or polyp or even colorectal cancer. …… A simple stool routine can reflect a lot of problems: fecal occult blood: it can detect a very small amount of bleeding in the stool that is invisible to the naked eye. Common diseases that show occult blood include tumors, ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease, liver cirrhosis, bleeding caused by disease, polyps, etc. The average patient with colorectal cancer and one-third of patients with adenomas will have regular bleeding. Early stage of GI cancers can be positive for occult blood in 20% of patients, and the rate of positive occult blood in advanced patients reaches more than 90%. Patients with gastrointestinal bleeding and peptic ulcers also tend to have positive or intermittent routine occult blood tests. White blood cells: high white blood cells indicate inflammation and understanding of the presence of bacterial infection in the digestive tract. Worm eggs: routine stool tests can also check for parasitic infections, which is more meaningful for Cantonese people who love raw fish. You can also check the “shape” and “color” of normal stool, which contains fecal bile, so it is yellow or brownish yellow, and changes in stool color or shape are often closely related to digestive diseases. Black or tarry stool: seen in the upper gastrointestinal bleeding; hemoglobin will turn black under the action of intestinal bacteria, common causes are: bleeding gastric or duodenal ulcer, ruptured esophageal varices bleeding. Dark red, red: mostly for lower gastrointestinal bleeding, if the bleeding volume is particularly large or the location of bleeding is relatively low, it will pull dark red or red when it is too late to be decomposed by bacteria. Common causes are: tumors, inflammatory bowel disease, hemorrhoids, anal fissures. Grayish-white (“white clay-like”): It is possible that jaundice or obstruction of the biliary tract due to various causes (stones, tumors, roundworms, etc.) has prevented bilirubin from being excreted with the stool. However, it should also be known that black stools are also related to food or medications. For example, if you eat pig’s blood, your stool will turn black; if you eat a lot of green vegetables with high chlorophyll content, your stool will be green; if you eat stomach medicine containing bismuth for stomach problems, or if you take iron supplements regularly for iron deficiency anemia, your stool will also be black. But if there is no above common reasons but pulling black stool or dark red blood stool should pay attention to, because this is the performance of gastrointestinal bleeding, hemoglobin in the role of intestinal bacteria will become black, if the bleeding is particularly large or bleeding location is relatively low, too late to be decomposed by bacteria will pull dark red or red. Both upper and lower gastrointestinal bleeding with bloody stools have a characteristic that blood and stool are mixed together. If the blood is only attached to the surface of the stool or drips after the stool, this is a case of bleeding near the rectum and anus, most commonly due to hemorrhoids. You can also get some information about the disease by looking at the shape of the stool. Normal stools should be cylindrical and soft. Abnormal shapes include: too hard, too rotten or even mucus or watery. Spherical hard stool: constipation can be seen; mucus thin stool: seen when the intestinal wall is irritated or inflammation, such as enteritis, dysentery and acute schistosomiasis; mucus pus blood stool: mostly seen in bacterial dysentery; sauce-colored mucus stool: mostly seen in amoebic dysentery; watery, egg-like stool: seen in acute gastroenteritis, a large number of times seen in pseudomembranous enteritis and cryptosporidium infection. Paste-like stool: mostly seen in small intestine disorders. How to distinguish bleeding hemorrhoids from bleeding colorectal cancer Colorectal cancer: most of the blood in stool of colorectal cancer is dark red, usually confused with stool, and in the middle and late stage, pus and blood stool may appear. In addition to the symptom of blood in stool, change in stool habit is also a typical symptom of colorectal cancer, such as thinning of stool and increase in frequency, etc. You should be alert to go to a regular hospital for examination. Hemorrhoids: Blood in stool usually occurs after defecation, in the form of dripping or spraying blood, bright red blood, blood and stool do not mix; the amount of bleeding caused by hemorrhoids varies, some intermittent bleeding in stool. In severe cases, bleeding is inevitable every time you have a bowel movement.