When Should You Get Medical Treatment For Fecal Incontinence?
You should be aware if you are a candidate for bowel incontinence. Risk factors include your gender, because childbirth can damage muscles and nerves that are needed and nerve damage that can be caused by having a child and by nerve damage because of diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Alzheimer’s disease late stage symptoms include bowel incontinence. Nerve damage and dementia will sometimes play a role in incontinence for a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. If the patient has a physical disability that prevents him or her from reaching the toilet in time, this may cause bowel incontinence.
If you or your child should develop fecal incontinence, it’s important you see your doctor. It can be embarrassing to talk about but it is necessary to catch this problem early. It is treatable and usually can be erased. New mothers often suffer from this problem after childbirth because of damage done to the sphincter muscle during birth.
There are several methods of screening and diagnosing problems with fecal incontinence. Your doctor will screen you by asking you questions about your elimination habits, diet, and how often you have incontinence problems. Your doctor will probably perform a physical examination to see if there is any irritation, hemorrhoids, infections or other conditions that could be causing the incontinence problem. A probe or pin may be used to touch this area of the rectum to see if the nerves react and contract the sphincter and pucker the anus.
A digital exam involves the doctor putting a gloved finger into your rectum. That will evaluate the strength of the muscles, see if there is any blood in the rectum, and check for other abnormalities. Your doctor may ask you to bear down on his finger so he can judge how strong the sphincter muscles are and check if rectal prolapse or another condition exists.
Other medical tests to help find the fecal incontinence problem include anal manometry, anorectal ultrasonography, proctography and a proctosigmoidoscopy. All of these tests have tubes or other instruments inserted into the anus to allow the doctor to find any polyps, scarring, inflammation or tumors. Many of these tests may be performed as an outpatient at your local hospital. Occasionally, the tests require fasting and a total purging of your digestive system. The test is done under general anesthetic and is a short procedure, normally only about 20 minutes.
One of the newest methods of listing at the colon and digestive system is by using a small camera the size of a tablet. It takes pictures as it passes through your digestive system and records any abnormalities that may be missed by conventional tests. Purging your digestive system is probably the most uncomfortable part of having these outpatient tests. Fasting, laxatives, and a purging drink make the preparation worse than the test. Because you will be under general anesthetic, someone will need to go with you so they can drive you home.