HONOLULU – New medications and more patient-focused strategies are changing the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome, as physicians move away from simply treating symptoms and gain a better understanding of IBS processes and mechanisms of action.
“I think there’s kind of an explosion in medications for functional bowel disease, specifically irritable bowel syndrome, over the last couple years, because we’ve gotten a lot smarter about how we think about these patients and how we treat these patients,” explained Dr. Darren M. Brenner, director of the functional bowel program at Northwestern University, Chicago.
In an interview at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology, Dr. Brenner discussed new approaches to target the syndrome’s mechanisms of action, new thinking by the Food and Drug Administration on IBS drug approval, and the wide range of traditional, complementary and alternative, and diet-related therapeutic options now available to patients.