# Nocturnal diarrhea



## caputsky (Jan 21, 2009)

Hi, For the past several months, I have been getting nocturnal diarrhea. Now, it hasn't happened every single night, usually only a couple nights a week. But, it has me concerned because I know that this is not a typical symptom of IBS. So my post is two-fold. First, has anyone else diagnosed with IBS had nocturnal diarrhea before? And secondly, does anyone out there know what possible conditions are associated with nocturnal diarrhea? I have already had 3 colonscopies, so I really don't want to go for another one. However, this symptom has me a bit worried (along with the fact that so many of the medications I have tried for IBS in the past/present hardly help if at all). Thanks in advance for the replies -- oh, and Happy Vday!Julie


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

Were there any biopsies taken with the colonosopies since the nocturnal diarrhea started?While the colon generally calms down at night, sometimes it does not so it could be IBS, just you got an unfortunate screw up in the calm down at night thing.I usually only get night diarrhea with a GI infection. I will sometimes have a night time BM even now the IBS is pretty much gone and they are normal consistency.Microscopic colitis often does cause diarrhea (usually watery) at night. About the only way to diagnose it is with a biopsy during a colonoscopy. You might also have a stool sample run just to make sure you didn't get a chronic Giardia infection or something like that, especially if you have a bad bout of diarrhea for a few days right before this started up.They do sometimes find pepto bismol is helpful for microscopic colitis so it might be worth trying that for a couple of weeks to see if it helps. It may help just from being an anti-diarrheal, but it has some other effects Imodium doesn't have that sometimes makes it useful for some things.


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