Symptoms of Ulcerative Colitis
Ulcerative colitis' most common symptoms are:
- Cramping pain in the belly (abdomen)
- Ongoing diarrhea
This happens because inflammation makes the intestine empty itself often. Sometimes the diarrhea is bloody.
The symptoms range from mild to severe. It’s normal to have periods of time without symptoms (remission) that may last months or years before your child gets symptoms again (recurrence).
Ulcerative colitis can lead to other health problems, or complications. These problems have their own symptoms. The main complications doctors watch for include:
- Dehydration, or loss of fluids, due to diarrhea
- Anemia, or low level of red blood cells, due to ongoing bleeding from ulcers. Anemia can cause extreme tiredness (fatigue).
- Severe swelling of the belly
- Weight loss
- Slowed growth or delayed puberty in children caused by not getting enough nutrients or by the medicines used to treat inflammatory bowel disease. Children with ulcerative colitis may have less appetite and eat less.
- Toxic megacolon, in which the colon gets severely inflamed and the wall weakens and balloons out. This can rupture, or perforate, the colon.
- Increased risk of colon cancer in people who have the disease for more than a decade.
The common symptoms and some complications of ulcerative colitis are much like other forms of IBD, including Crohn’s disease. It takes time to tell which illness a child has.
Ulcerative Colitis Diagnosis
To diagnose ulcerative colitis, your child's doctor will ask for a detailed history of your child’s illness. Then the doctor will examine your child. Several tests also can help doctors diagnose this disease. Your child may have:
- Blood tests to check for anemia, which is caused by excessive bleeding
- Blood tests to look for a high level of white blood cells, which is a sign of inflammation
- Stool (feces) sample tests to look for blood or signs of infection
- X-rays, including sets of X-rays called an upper GI (PDF 48KB) (gastrointestinal) series and a lower GI (PDF 44KB) series (barium enema). Before having either of these X-rays, your child will drink a liquid or have a liquid put in their colon (enema) that shows up on X-ray film.
- CT (computed tomography) scan (sometimes said “cat scan”), another way to see inside the belly
- Sigmoidoscopy (pronounced sig-moid-OSS-cope-ee) and colonoscopy (pronounced coal-un-OSS-cope-ee) let doctors look inside your child's intestine using a thin tube with a camera called an endoscope. The endoscope lets doctors see pictures on a TV monitor. Colonoscopy looks at the whole colon. Sigmoioscopy looks only at the lower colon.
One of the best ways to tell what’s happening in your child’s intestine is for the doctor to look at it. Doctors do this by inserting a thin, flexible, lighted tube (endoscope) through your child’s anus. The tube has a camera that’s connected to a computer and a TV monitor. Using this camera, the doctor can look for inflammation, ulcers and bleeding, and can even take a tiny sample of the intestine for testing (biopsy). When doctors look at only the lower colon, this procedure is called sigmoidoscopy (pronounced sig-moid-OSS-cope-ee). When they look at the whole colon, it’s called colonoscopy (pronounced coal-un-OSS-cope-ee).