Other diseases affecting the bowel are different. During an acute phase of their condition, patients with a chronic inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis may have real sores in their bowel wall. With these conditions the trouble is not that even tiny stimuli are transferred from the gut to the brain—their threshold is still high enough to prevent that. The problems are caused by the diseased mucus membrane of the gut. Like patients with irritable bowel syndrome, sufferers of these conditions also show increased rates of depression and anxiety.
