Dr Amir Khan

And they do a lot of work while you're sleeping.

And so it's really good for them.

And so all of those things combined, if you can't take HRT or whether you're on HRT, should actually help with your gut movements.

Yeah, so IBS is irritable bowel syndrome.

And it's a diagnosis that we make on a basis of a collection of symptoms.

So there's no test for irritable bowel.

We often have to rule out other things like inflammatory bowel, which is Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, and bowel cancer as well, of course.

But the symptoms that are collectively known as irritable bowel are a hypersensitive gut, cramping, which can be very painful, lots of bloating and a change in your bowel habits usually alternates between constipation and diarrhoea.

And it happens.

We don't really know exactly the cause.

It could be stress-related, it could be trauma-related, it could be a physical or mental trauma that can trigger off these symptoms.

Anxiety plays a big part of it because the gut and the brain are really linked.

We have a nerve called the vagus nerve that connects the two of them, but also...

the gut microbiome release what we call neurotransmitters.

So serotonin, all of that stuff is secreted or made by the gut microbes and it helps connect to the brain.

So there's a two-way connection going both ways.

A massive connection, yeah.

And lots of people refer to the gut as the second brain as well because the two are so linked.

And so if you're stressed or anxious up here in your brain, that then feeds down into your gut via the vagus nerve and vice versa because that stress and anxiety affects how much of these neurotransmitters your gut microbes are making.

So all of that then affects your digestion and that can lead to irritable bowel.