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Crohn's & Colitis

• Your digestive system helps you digest food and eliminate solid waste from your body. It includes your mouth, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, rectum, and anus. To see an image showing the different parts of the digestive system, refer to Figure 1.
• Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), also known as Crohn's & Colitis, is a medical term that describes two separate diseases affecting the digestive system:
• Crohn's disease (CD)
  ulcerative colitis (UC)
• Both CD and UC damage the lining of the digestive system by causing inflammation, sores, bleeding, and scarring. This can lead to symptoms such as abdominal pain and cramps, diarrhea (which may be bloody), loss of appetite, malnutrition, and weight loss. IBD can also cause symptoms that have nothing to do with the digestive system, such as fatigue, fever, mouth ulcers, skin rashes, eye inflammation, or joint pain.
• IBD can have a serious impact on your quality of life
  CD and UC have many symptoms in common, but they are separate medical conditions. So what's the difference between CD and UC?
• UC affects only the colon (large intestine), while CD can affect any part of the digestive system.
  UC tends to damage only the inner layer of bowel tissue, while CD can damage many layers of tissue.
  UC tends to affect a continuous area of the colon, usually starting from the rectum and moving up through the colon, while CD sores tend to occur in patches.
  UC can be cured surgically by removing the colon, but CD cannot.