Among the cases seen in the clinic, there are many patients who complain of having to relieve stools three or four times a day, especially immediately after meals, having a sense of distress in defecating, and having diarrhea immediately after meals, partly accompanied by abdominal pain. What kind of situation is this?
This is actually a disease. Most of them belong to functional gastrointestinal disease – a special manifestation of “irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)”, which is not given a disease name in textbooks, so I will call it “gastrocolonic hyperreflexia I will call it “hyperreflexia of the stomach and colon”. The so-called functional gastrointestinal disease is simply explained as a series of gastrointestinal symptoms that are mainly caused by abnormal gastrointestinal motility and gastrointestinal sensory hypersensitivity, which are found to be fine by various tests, including gastroscopy.
Gastrocolic hyperreflexia is common in patients with diarrheal IBS.
How does gastrocolic hyperreflexia develop? In such a subset of patients with increased stool frequency and the need to defecate immediately after meals, there is a process of enhanced gastric-central-colonic reflexes. After food enters the gastric lumen, information is uploaded to the central nervous system and sent downward to the intestinal vagal reflex, and the entire process of neuroelectrical signals is amplified step by step, which leads to strong group contractions of the colon. Colonic dynamics testing of these patients revealed a significant increase in the amplitude and duration of postprandial colonic high-amplitude burst waves compared to normal subjects. The symptoms that manifest themselves are rapid production of bowel movements, a sense of stool distress, even diarrhea, and abdominal pain. The abdominal pain is usually relieved after defecation. Some patients experience weight loss, wasting, and increasing psychological burden due to poor treatment results.