# Is IBS contagious?



## Neilers (Jun 2, 2005)

I was wondering if anyone had any info on whether IBS was contagious or not. I've seen on just about every website that it's not, but I wound up being in an intimate relationship with a woman (about a year ago), and a month into it she started having symptoms similiar to mine. She had already been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and has uterine cysts (both which may cause IBS-like symptoms), but the timing of everything seems a bit beyond coincidential. I need some piece of mind....Am i spreading this horrible problem to other people?


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## eric (Jul 8, 1999)

You can rest assured it is not contagious at all.Its not that kind of a problem and IBS itself cannot be transmitted.


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## kateandtink (Sep 1, 2004)

not contagious, cause unkknown but if geneitc then may run in family's


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## 17176 (Mar 31, 2005)

its not contagious but i know it can run in families.


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## 16790 (Oct 6, 2006)

IBS-C is contagious!I really wish it wasn't. I've had two girl friends since I caught it, and about a month after we've been intimate, they both got full blown IBS-C.That can not possibly be coincidence.


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## SophieUK (Dec 18, 2000)

IBS is categorically NOT contagious, so it can't be transferred through physical contact or anything like that. It's very common though so some coincidences are bound to happen.


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

IBS is not contagious.GI-infections that sometimes trigger IBS are contagious, but will not trigger IBS in everyone that got ill from the same outbreak of GI illness.Sometimes shared environment like diet, etc may trigger IBS symptoms in people who spend time in the same environment and diet, but they each got the IBS independently, they just happen to both get symptoms from something they do together.Lastly as Sophie said IBS is very common so it is expected that a fair percentage of people will report coincidences. K.


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## 16790 (Oct 6, 2006)

Ok, well let me re-phrase that then. The cause of IBS-C, not IBS-C itself, is contagious.Happy?


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## eric (Jul 8, 1999)

The majority of most gut infections will cause D, as the digestive system trys to expell the pathogen.allowichus its work reading these.http://hopkins-gi.nts.jhu.edu/pages/latin/...se=43&lang_id=1http://www.aboutibs.org/


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

But you are not endlessly sick with the GI infection, so you didn't give them the infection that may have been what triggered you.If you study a whole group of people that got the same GI illness AT THE SAME TIME in an outbreak and compare them to a similar group that were not sick at the same time then more of the people who had the GI illness will have IBS.You are not giving someone the same GI illness you had years after you recovered from it and ended up with IBS because you didn't heal up quite right.K.


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

PS. If you were constantly and endlessly shedding GI viruses or food poisoning bacteria it would be getting EVERYONE around you sick, not just girlfriends after you had been intimate with them for awhile.


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## 14856 (Apr 17, 2006)

IBS is EXTREMELY contagious...Everyone on this board has caught it.............................................................(Im kidding by the way)


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## DireWeeYah (Sep 27, 2000)

It could be "contagious" in quotes. There are folks who could be adversely affected by witnessing someone with ill symptoms. I don't want to say it is a hypochondriac-like response but the syndrome exists. Experiencing the symptoms through someone else causes some people to think that they are going to inevitably get the same illness. That general anxiety causes the SYMPTOMS but not the disease in some groups of people. So you may have IBS-like symptoms without having IBS. "Oh c r ap , now I have IBS" one may admit and guess what, your brain will make you believe it. I've personally witnessed this with some people I know. In a similar response, one of my friends read an advertisment for a cell-phone radiation buster. The ad claimed cell phones will cause brain cancer so you should buy their little radiation filter. The next day she had headaches and swore she must have brain cancer. I told her she was silly and fell victim to the suggestions in the ad. She's fine.


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## Dijin (Apr 4, 2018)

Hey there, so I know the medical consensus, and it's great how much they've told everyone it's not contagious, but you know, that didn't help when from some retrospectively foolish, but at the time fine sexual activities I caught the same list of IBS symptoms from a partner and had them spread to my near-family.

Thanks guys, for telling us deceitful truths about a poorly understood syndrome. 
To note: I'm not disputing the widely recognized medical knowledge. Just in that its application has added another notch to why I can't feel like trusting it is appropriate. I thought that understanding that a thing wasn't contagious would make it so, and since that was bullshit once, and we're just plebs trying to explain our problems to the wise medical society, there's a not so polite echo chamber spreading what, in this case, to me, is near enough to be false information about the contagiousness of a disease. Oh, it's not a disease because the dis-ease it causes is a syndrome that's poorly understood. Go, I don't know, reform medical school.


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## ♧Pandora☆ (Jun 23, 2017)

The reason so many people debate "is ibs contagious" is because ibs is not what anyone has.

Ibs is a term for a group of symptoms.

Depending on what that persons root causes are will depend on if its contagious or not.

C - diff, parasites, virals, bacteria
etc


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