What Cause Abdominal Pain

Causes of abdominal pain can be difficult to identify. In fact half of the time doctors are unable to tell what is causing pain in the abdomen. You may even know someone who may have felt disappointment with the diagnosis of the cause of their tummy pain. We will therefore attempt to go through all the common causes of pain in the abdomen and work our way through the characteristics of abdominal pain in each of these conditions.

Abdominal pain is caused by inflammation (for example, appendicitis, diverticulitis, colitis ), by stretching or distention of an organ (for example, obstruction of the intestine, blockage of a bile duct by gallstones, swelling of the liver with hepatitis), or by loss of the supply of blood to an organ (for example, ischemic colitis).

To complicate matters, however, abdominal pain also can occur without inflammation, distention or loss of blood supply. An important example of this latter type of muscle pain is the irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It is not clear what causes the abdominal pain in IBS, but it is believed to be due either to abnormal contractions of the intestinal muscles (for example, spasm) or abnormally sensitive nerves within the intestines that give rise to painful sensations inappropriately (visceral hyper-sensitivity). These latter types of muscle pain are often referred to as functional pain because no recognizable (visible) causes for the pain have been found - at least not yet.