Diagnosing is a tough task as the diagnosis is much like many other gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. There is no one absolute test which can pin-point whether a patient is suffering from Crohn's or some other disease. Even experienced physicians sometimes diagnose the patients wrongly, multiple times with some other disease before detecting the actual culprit called Crohn's disease.

Symptoms of Crohn's vary from person to person, thus diagnosing becomes more and more difficult. It is such a challenge because there are no strict medical guidelines to help the health care provider determine your ailment in this case.

Similar Symptoms Add To The Confusion

The symptoms of are: pain in the abdomen, disturbed bowel movements, bleeding from the rectum, fever, weight loss etc. These symptoms are not distinctly only of Crohn's; these may point to many other diseases like infections, digestion problems and many more.

This disease is caused mainly because of inflammation of the intestines. Though the exact cause is not known, the inflammation may be due to a viral or bacterial attack on the intestines. In this disease, the GI track acts if it is fighting with some infection, while there is no infection, this causes inflammation.

Detecting Inflammation

If the physician is able to detect that the disturbed bowel movements you are experiencing is due to inflammation, and not any infection, then diagnosing becomes somewhat easier. This may be done by a stool test in the lab. A stool sample is the simplest way to determine whether your upset bowel is due to inflammation or not.

Other tests mostly recommended for diagnosing the disease are colonoscopy, small bowel x-ray study, a barium enema, a flexible sigmoidoscopy and a capsule endoscopy. Some doctors also recommend a CT scan of the abdomen. A full blood test is also done for blood count and presence of infection. When these tests are done in totality and studied in presence of Crohn's symptoms, it leads to a successful diagnosis of this disease.

Once all your test results come, the physician would call you to

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discuss the results. If during your blood test, there is an indication of an infection, then most likely you don't have Crohn's disease. But if the blood test shows that you are anemic, this might indicate that you are suffering from Crohn's. Though, just being anemic doesn't mean you definitely have this disease. This is why for properly diagnosis of this disease; the result of all tests has to be studied on a common platform.

The colonoscopy and flexible sigmoidoscopy may or may not reveal that you are having Crohn's disease. If the inflammation is in the lower part of the colon, these tests will show it. However, if it is higher up or it is present only in the small intestine, it will not show up in these tests. If your symptoms persist, your physician may want to go in for CT scan of the abdomen.

As you must have realized by now, diagnosing this particular disease is like solving a jigsaw puzzle where your doctor has to put several pieces of information in the right places to get the full picture. You must remain patient throughout the process and let the doctor do his work methodologically.

Once diagnosing has been achieved successfully and you know you have it, you should start on medication and other remedies to treat the symptoms and manage it effectively.