How to Identify Causes of Diarrhea

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I am a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I am going to talk to you about how to identify the causes of diarrhea. There are actually many different causes of diarrhea. Some of the really basic causes are bacterial or viral infections. A lot of times people refer to it as getting the stomach flu or stomach virus and that is a real common cause of getting diarrhea. Often it happens when eating food that has been contaminated or for example touching your mouth or touching your face after you have touched a surface that has some type of bacteria or virus on it or drinking from a glass from somebody else who already has a virus, those are really the most common ways of getting diarrhea. Other causes can be from medications. There are some medications that will actually cause you to develop diarrhea. With some medications it will be short term for example there are some diabetes medications that will cause short term diarrhea until the person's digestive tract has resolved itself to it and it usually resolves itself within a few days. Other medications the person just doesn't tolerate and they have to be put on something different. Besides medications there are actually certain foods that people will have intolerances to. For example lactose intolerance, it is very common. People who have lactose intolerance they just don't have enough of the lactate enzyme to digest lactose in milk products and therefore when they have a milk product they develop diarrhea because their body just cannot digest it. Sometimes these people can take a lactase enzyme and still use that particular dairy product and not experience symptoms or they may just need to use a lactose free dairy product or avoid dairy altogether. Other causes of diarrhea are actual medical conditions things like IBS, Krohn's or Irritable Bowel Disease which is somewhat different from Irritable Bowel Syndrome and all sorts of colitises and other particular causes so these are actual medical conditions that happen in your digestive tract that can cause diarrhea so several different causes of diarrhea."