Wild New Hypothesis Suggests IBS Could Be a Form of 'Gravity Intolerance'
02 December 2022
By Carly Cassella
Hmm ...
And given my 40-some year history with IBS, it is of interest.
Saw it just now in a post in Space Colonization Discussion group, of all places.
https://www.sciencealert.com/wild-new-h ... ntolerance
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There's an invisible and relentless force acting on your bowels right now, and it might be causing some people serious irritation.
No one really knows how or why irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) develops, but gastroenterologist Brennan Spiegel from Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles has outlined a weighty new hypothesis.
In a paper (
https://journals.lww.com/ajg/Fulltext/2 ... le.15.aspx) published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, Spiegel argues IBS is triggered by the body's inability to manage gravity.
Our bowels, Spiegel explains, are like a big sack of potatoes that we have to carry around our whole lives.
If our body's usual management of gravity fails for whatever reason, our diaphragm can slip down and compress our intestines, possibly causing motility issues and bacterial overgrowth.
"Our nervous system also evolved in a world of gravity, and that might explain why many people feel abdominal 'butterflies' when anxious," says Spiegel.
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Gravity, he argues, might be the grounding force that pulls all these different symptoms together.
Under Spiegel's framework, a disordered response to gravity might also trigger a gut-to-brain interaction disorder. By squashing the intestines, it might even impact the gut microbiome, causing hypersensitivity, inflammation, or discomfort.
"There's such a variety of explanations that I wondered if they could all be simultaneously true," says Spiegel.
"As I thought about each theory, from those involving motility, to bacteria, to the neuropsychology of IBS, I realized they might all point back to gravity as a unifying factor. It seemed pretty strange at first, no doubt, but as I developed the idea and ran it by colleagues, it started to make sense."
If IBS is caused by the body struggling to grapple with gravity, then it could explain why physical therapy and exercise can prove so beneficial in relieving its symptoms.
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Chronic fatigue syndrome/ myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is another chronic and debilitating sickness without a cause or cure, and it often crosses over with IBS. Many CFS/ME patients also struggle with standing up, which can cause a sudden drop in blood pressure, fatigue, dizziness, and a racing heart.
Other symptoms that cross over with IBS include lower back pain, headaches, dizziness and postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which is when blood pressure plummets after a person rises.
All of these conditions could be explained by the body's inability to properly manage the force of gravity.
Without direct research, Siegel says the gravity hypothesis is just a "thought experiment". But he hopes it encourages new ways of researching and treating IBS in the future.
That bit about ME/CFS is of great interest since my Dad was one of US Navy's first medical retirements, and maybe even the literal first, in middle 1980s with ME/CFS.
And then about 20 years later it got me one Christmas while I was working retail and hasn't yet been persuaded to go away ...
And I had been diagnosed with IBS in late 1970s or beginning of 1980s.
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
02 Dec 2022, 2:59 pm
