Grace Burns

There's a reason for the push.

On ABC Radio National, you're with The Health Report.

Irritable bowel syndrome is very common, Norman.

You've kind of declared that perhaps you have it on air.

We're building your medical history.

I feel like we know your knee and now we're moving to the guts.

But it is a very complex condition, irritable bowel syndrome, and it can really impact people's quality of life.

But at the moment, diagnosis is based on fulfilling symptom criteria, undergoing investigations, you know, blood tests, stool samples to make sure that nothing else is going on like celiac disease.

Yeah, you kind of have to fit this symptom profile and then it's a diagnosis of exclusion.

We have to make sure there's nothing else going on.

But there's a study suggesting that perhaps there are clear biomarkers, that perhaps there is something going on in the body that we can detect that can help build the case for diagnosis of IBS.

And this could be a really big change for people in this area.

And I spoke to lead author of the study, Dr. Grace Burns, who's a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Research Excellence in Digestive Health at the University of Newcastle.

Which one comes first, Grace?

Because does this change...

the notion that IBS is a functional disorder.

Does this, I guess what I'm asking is, are these biomarkers raised because of the underlying mechanisms or pathology in IBS?

Or are these markers that you've found, these pro-inflammatory cytokines, are they causing the IBS?

Which way is it, do you think?

The fecal calprotectin test, so that looks for inflammation in the gut, that's a stool test that can often pick up people with things like inflammatory bowel disease, so it'll often be raised.