Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency

[megj17@gmail.com]

Hi! Brand new to the site, but so happy I found it I was diagnosed with lymphocytic colitis about four years ago and two years ago with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI). I wanted to see if anyone else has developed EPI perhaps as a result of MC??

[tex]

Hi,

Welcome to the group. I doubt that you will get many responses to your question, because for most of us, our gastroenterologists never bother to check our pancreatic enzyme production level. There are still a lot of gastroenterologist who don't realize that this disease can inflame any organ in the digestive system, and consequently, many of us have an inflamed pancreas (until we get the symptoms of this disease under control, by suppressing the inflammation). Fortunately, (at least for most of us), as we began to bring our inflammation levels down, and our digestive system begins to heal, the inflammation in our pancreas is also suppressed, and our pancreatic enzyme production slowly increases until it's back to a normal, or near normal level.

A similar situation develops in the small intestine. The small intestine loses its ability to produce the necessary digestive enzymes because of the inflammation, and that's the main reason why why our digestion heads south, and we start seeing undigested food in the toilet. That too, resolves as we manage to get the inflammation back under control.

Tex

[megj17@gmail.com]

Tex,
Thank you so much for your reply! You mentioned controlling symptoms: do you mean with something like budesonide or diet or both? I don’t want to take steroids, but would like to work on finding a diet that will mostly alleviate my symptoms

[tex]

MC is caused by chronic Inflammation, so "controlling symptoms" means controlling/suppressing the inflammation. Most of us here do that by careful diet changes, but it can also be done with medications (preferably budesonide), or a combination of medications and diet changes.

Tex

[megj17@gmail.com]

Thank you!