Do you have IBS-D, or do you have Habba Syndrome? That’s what Dr Saad F Habba would like to know. He’s coined the term Habba Syndrome to describe a condition that causes chronic diarrhea and is caused by a faulty gallbladder, and he believes that millions of IBS-D patients have been misdiagnosed and actually have Habba Syndrome.
This is the theory: when the gallbladder goes haywire, you end up with too much bile in the intestines, and the bile causes diarrhea. This, of course, is the same thing that happens to some patients who have had their gallbladders removed. The treatment is the same too, with drugs such as Questran used to bind the bile.
One particular feature of Habba Syndrome is diarrhea straight after a meal, which is called post-prandial diarrhea, and occurs because bile acids are naturally released directly after meals. This is something that many patients with diarrhea-predominant IBS experience.
Sound interesting? For me, one of the best things about this theory is that there’s a specific test that can be used to see whether your gallbladder’s gone bad. It’s called a HIDA or DSIDA scan with CCK injection, which in layman’s terms means that you get injected with some mildly radioactive stuff to highlight the bile, lie in one of those big white scanning machines, and wait while the docs study the flow of bile through your body.
This is a fairly new theory, so who knows whether we will all be having HIDA scans in the future. Theories like this tend to take years to really gain traction.
Lately, though, Dr Habba has taken his theory even further. In an article published in 2010, he suggested that IBS-D doesn’t exist at all. He studied 303 patients and concluded that 98% of them were suffering from a ‘true clinical entity’ rather than the ‘vague entity’ that is IBS.
Of the 303 patients, he concluded that 41% had Habba Syndrome, 23% had diarrhea caused by gallbladder removal, 8% lactose intolerance, 7% microscopic colitis, 4% celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, and then a handful of patients had multiple diagnoses, drug-induced bowel problems, infectious colitis or other problems. In follow-ups, 98% of patients improved significantly when their specific problems were treated appropriately.
In other words – IBS-D, to all intents and purposes, is fictional. Wow.
Now, this was only one study, and I’m sure there are many doctors who are busy refuting the theory, because that’s how medicine works. But I have to say that this is a fascinating idea, and it addresses what it is, to me, one of the stupidest aspects of the IBS diagnosis, and that is the fact that people who have their gallbladders out and subsequently suffer from bile-related diarrhea get told they have IBS. How can that possibly be called IBS? You might as well diagnose someone with IBS if they’re taking 20 laxatives every morning, as if the mere presence of severe diarrhea automatically means IBS.
It seems obvious to me that post-gallbladder removal diarrhea is not IBS-D, just as diarrhea when you’ve had half your colon cut out isn’t IBS-D, so why doctors insist on calling it IBS I have no idea.
But maybe the problem isn’t just that doctors call gallbladder-related diarrhea IBS. Maybe the problem is that they call anything IBS…and none of us have irritable bowels at all.
