Increased risk of irritable bowel syndrome after bacterial gastroenteritis: cohort study.

Evidence exists of an increased risk of irritable bowel syndrome after an episode of bacterial gastroenteritis.[1 2] In one study, 12 out of 38 patients presented with bowel dysfunction 1 year after salmonella gastroenteritis.[1] In another study, 386 patients with bacterial gastroenteritis were surveyed by questionnaire 6 months after infection, and 27 (7%) had developed irritable bowel syndrome.[2] Both studies, however, lacked a control group.[3]

Subjects, methods, and results

Our source population came from the General Practice Research Database, which contains clinical information on patients recorded by general practitioners in the United Kingdom.[4]

We identified patients aged 25 to 74 with a bacteriologically confirmed first episode of gastroenteritis, from a recent study that examined the association between acid suppressing drugs and the development of gastroenteritis.[5] We excluded all patients with a history of irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, or alcoholism. We sampled a comparison cohort from the source population from which patients with gastroenteritis had been ascertained. We applied the same eligibility criteria as were used for the …