Symptoms of ulcerative colitis

Symptoms of ulcerative colitis

The hallmark symptom is blood in the stool. Not an occasional streak from piles, but recurrent diarrhoea mixed with blood and mucus, often many times a day. If you have been passing blood with loose motions for weeks, this is the disease to test for - not "weak digestion."

The core bowel symptoms:

• Bloody diarrhoea with mucus - the defining feature
• Urgency - a sudden, hard-to-hold need to pass motion; fear of accidents shapes patients' whole day
• Tenesmus - the frustrating feeling of incomplete evacuation, needing to return to the toilet repeatedly
• Frequent motions - from 3-4 a day in mild disease to 10-20 in severe flares, including night-time motions (night symptoms are a red flag: ordinary IBS never wakes you)
• Crampy lower abdominal pain, often relieved briefly by passing motion

Whole-body symptoms:

• Fatigue - from chronic blood loss, inflammation and poor sleep; often the most disabling complaint
• Anaemia - from ongoing blood loss: pallor, breathlessness, weakness
• Weight loss and poor appetite during flares
• Fever - a warning sign of a severe flare

Symptoms outside the gut (in some patients): joint pains, red painful eyes (uveitis), skin rashes (erythema nodosum, pyoderma), and mouth ulcers. These are part of the same immune disease.

Severe-flare danger signs - hospital immediately: fever with a distended, tender abdomen, very frequent bloody motions with dizziness or fainting, and signs of dehydration. A toxic megacolon - a dangerous dilation of the colon - is a life-threatening emergency.

Remember: weeks of bloody mucus-filled diarrhoea with urgency is never "normal digestion" - it needs a gastroenterologist and a colonoscopy. Fever plus a swollen tender abdomen is an emergency.

Ayurvedic view (interpretive)

Raktatisara (bloody diarrhoea) in classical texts describes the surface picture well. Symptom recognition matches; what traditional observation could not provide is the colonoscopy that confirms UC and excludes cancer and infection.