Wondering if you have SIBO or not? In today's video, I'm going to talk about how to tell if
you have SIBO. Stay tuned. If you're new here, welcome, my name's Amanda Malachesky. I'm a
certified functional nutrition health coach and a digestive and allergy detective. For weekly
videos on how to find your personalized diet and supplement plan for IBS and SIBO, please consider
subscribing, and be sure to click the bell to be notified when I post a new video. One of the most
common underlying causes of IBS symptoms, like bloating, constipation, and diarrhea, is actually
small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, otherwise known as SIBO. In fact, Dr. Pimentel, the primary
SIBO researcher in the US, estimates that 60% of IBS cases may actually be caused by SIBO.
So if you have this symptom collection, how do you know if you have SIBO or not? In this video,
I'm going to share the five different ways to know if you have SIBO or not, so let's get started.
So the gold standard to determine whether or not you have SIBO is actually something called a small
bowel aspirate, which is where your doctor goes in through an endoscopy, while you're
under anesthesia, and takes a sample of the fluid in your small bowel and then cultures it later.
But let's face it, this is obviously a very invasive procedure, maybe kind of expensive,
and somewhat inaccessible to a lot of people. In addition, because the sampling only takes samples
from the upper part of the small intestine, but SIBO can live anywhere in the small intestine,
in a certain way, I feel like this test is maybe actually less accurate, because it's
less likely to identify infections farther down in the small intestine. So for most people,
even though this is the research gold standard, this is a no-go and really unnecessary.
The second way to know if you have SIBO is to, of course, consider your symptoms. Of course,
the common symptoms of SIBO include things like bloating, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea,
or both constipation and diarrhea alternating or together. And it also sometimes includes things
like brain fog, muscle pain, fatigue, and additional symptoms like food sensitivities,
or sometimes even reflux and heartburn. So mostly though, symptoms are useful for getting you into
the right ballpark of the problem, but they don't really help you specifically determine whether or
not you have SIBO, because these symptoms are also common with many other digestive
problems, like irritable bowel syndrome, also called IBS, or inflammatory bowel disease,
which includes things like Crohn's disease and colitis, or even celiac disease. So again, even
though symptoms are helpful, they're not really enough to tell whether or not you have, SIBO.
The third way to know if you have SIBO or not is to rule out all other causes. And this is a common
way that standard and conventional doctors will work the process. So if you go to a conventional
provider and report these digestive symptoms like bloating, constipation, and diarrhea,
they're likely to run their diagnostic rubric, which includes things like maybe blood testing
or maybe stool testing, and an endoscopy to look at your stomach, from the top down,
and a colonoscopy to look at your lower bowel from the bottom up, to make sure that there's
no pathology or cancer, or any number of other difficult digestive issues going on.
So if you've had one of these thorough workups from your gastroenterologist or
primary care provider, and they've turned up empty, except for maybe some mild gastritis,
this is an indicator that SIBO may be an issue for you. There may also be other causes like
underlying subclinical infections in the large bowel, which can be evaluated with a GI-MAP stool
test or similar. And if that's something you want to learn a little bit more about,
I did make a video about that. And I'll leave a link for that in the description below this video.
So I'm curious, have you had a GI workup that came up empty-handed?
If so, maybe click the like button or leave me a comment below this video. So the fourth
way to tell whether or not you have SIBO is actually just to run some simple SIBO testing.
So if you are someone who has had that fancy GI workup and nothing turned up, or if you'd
rather not run that fancy GI workup, or you can't afford one right now, I believe it's absolutely
worthwhile to run the simple SIBO testing. SIBO testing is done at home with a simple at-home
breath test kit. After a one-day prep diet, you take a baseline breath reading, and then you drink
a solution, usually either glucose or a lactulose. And then take breath samples every 15 or 20
minutes, depending on the test kit to measure the gases in your breath. And if during this
first 90 minutes of this test, your gas levels go up, this indicates that you have SIBO because the
human body doesn't generate hydrogen or methane gas, or the hydrogen sulfide either. These are
always byproducts of bacteria making these gases. If you'd like to see what the test kit process
looks like, I do have a video where I talk about that. So I will leave a link for that
in the description below this video for you. Most SIBO tests look for methane or hydrogen gases, but
the new Trio-Smart test also looks for hydrogen sulfide gas, which can be a cause of diarrhea.
If you can get your doctor or naturopath to order the SIBO test, it's very commonly covered
by insurance, though not always. Although some practitioners aren't able to offer this insurance
service, and some insurance also won't cover the test, but if you have access to a doctor who's
willing to work with you, it's worth a try to try and get the insurance coverage for the test.
The cash pay out-of-pocket price for these tests is usually in the neighborhood of $200 to $240.
Now, these tests are imperfect in some ways, and they do need to be read by a knowledgeable
practitioner, but they're a lot less invasive than going under anesthesia just to find out if
you have a simple infection. The fifth way to know if you have SIBO is a combination of testing and
treatment. So if you test positive on your SIBO test and then you do SIBO treatment and your
symptoms improve, this indicates that the SIBO on your test was indeed part of your symptoms.
On the flip side, if you treat the SIBO and nothing changes, this indicates that the positive
SIBO result on the test was maybe what's called an incidental finding. It basically just means
that the SIBO on the test doesn't really relate to your symptoms. Some people who are healthy
and have no GI issues will test positive for SIBO. So there's not always a correlation between those
elevated gas levels and digestive symptoms. In this case, you'll want to look at different
kinds of potential causes, things like small intestinal fungal overgrowth, or CIFO, are a
possibility. Or again, other kinds of infections in the large bowel, subclinical infections,
or dysbiosis, or various other possible causes. So if you don't see results from your SIBO treatment,
don't despair, this really just gives you more information to work with, to try and
narrow down what exactly is going on. I'm a big believer in viewing anything that
happens as useful information, even if it's not the result that we intended. So
again, don't despair if you don't get the results you hope for, it just gives you more information
to work with and to plot your next steps. So of course, SIBO testing is just the first step in
the process. There's also, of course, treatment and various kinds of dietary changes that can
be useful, and supplements that can be helpful. And as always with SIBO, you always have to keep
looking for the underlying root cause. SIBO is a consequence usually of some
kind of motility problem. So you need to understand what else is going on there.
Do you need help navigating your SIBO testing and management? If so, I want to make sure
you grab a free copy of my guide called The Roadmap to Gut Recovery. Inside that guide,
I share the exact same strategy that I share with my clients inside my programs to help them figure
out how to create their personalized plan for IBS and SIBO symptom remission. You can grab your free
copy by going to confluencenutrition.com/roadmap. I will leave a link for that in the description
below this video, so do go ahead and grab that if this could be helpful for you.
All right, let me know if this video was helpful by clicking like or leaving me a comment, and go
ahead also and check out this video next about how to do a SIBO test. I will see you all next time.