Melatonin for IBS

Part of my WILD series (What I am Learning Daily). I look into IBS

Everybody this is dr. windy and i am going to share with you a new feature on my podcast social media it’s called wild what i am learning daily and today’s episode is on some research i am reading related to melatonin for irritable bowel syndrome this seemed like a practical treatment that i wanted to investigate to see if there was any data that could help

Understand if we could use melatonin as a treatment for people with irritable bowel syndrome so let’s get into the research and so we see here this is a review that appeared in gut in 2005 i’ve had this review in my database for quite some time and i thought it would be a good time to break this out and understand it so melatonin has been something that has been

Used widely for sleep disruption and there’s a hypothesis that in ibs that some of the symptoms of irritable syndrome are related to sleep disruption so let’s see what this research review share with us so it talks about how there’s a strong overlap between fibromyalgia and ibs and the author goes on to say that these two conditions share an overlap in that both

Conditions could be linked to disruption in sleep physiology this was new to me to share this link it is well established in my practice that people with fiber out fibromyalgia have sleep disruption but i haven’t heard quite so much that here no bowel syndrome patients have a strong link to sleep disruption so the author goes on the author goes on to look at the

Different research of studies that showed that ibs had some link between sleep disruption and there was no conclusive evidence that ibs patients have this link so that kind of set up the question about melatonin and why it was showing some benefits in ibs patients if there is no known underlying sleep disruption in ibs so we do know that patients with ibs tend to

Have greater anxiety which would possibly be as a consequence of having ibs and it’s disruption of the microbiome and it’s also disruption of neurotransmitters and just living with a condition that is so disruptive they may develop some anxiety however this link between why melatonin might work in ibs patients because of sleep disorders was not strongly established

So there was a study that the author talked about in the publication gut that was performed by song and colleagues that used melatonin and ibs patients and the results were significant patients with ibs reported outcomes of reduced abdominal pain and also they did other measures such as rectal pressure and volume thresholds in the rectal region for both urgency and

Pain sensations both those were significantly increased following melatonin treatment however the sleep studies that they did during the the trials did not show any changes or benefits from the melatonin in measures of sleep patterns or sleep import improvements also there was no changes in outcomes of anxiety and depression for these patients so they established

That there was some physical benefit but not via the hypothesis that you would think of why in milton and would obviously help so i’m going to kind of go into this a little bit more based on my experience and we know now this is study was done quite some time ago we know now that melatonin is an antioxidant we also know that it is a mast cell stabilizer so people

Who have ibs have excessive amounts of mass cells generally speaking that are activated in the intestinal lining and so perhaps the improvement was based on the antioxidant effect and also the mast cells stabilizing effect and you know i think one of the ways that this might be used in practice is someone who has ibs and is having sleep disruption they might as

Well try it melatonin has very little downside usually the doses are anywhere between 1 and 3 milligrams at bedtime and we generally see some side effects of increased drowsiness some people have vivid dreams when they take melatonin that they do not like other people like it like those kinds of dreams but however this is something that i think is worth trying

And you know mast cell activation doesn’t seem to happen in all the ibs patients but there is a certain subset that are highly reactive to foods and have lots of food intolerances and may have excessive mast cells and if it’s combined with sleep disruption i think thinking about melatonin is something i know that i’m going to think more about after reading this

Research review thank you for tuning in to wild which is an acronym for what i am learning daily take care

Transcribed from video
Melatonin for IBS By Adam Rinde ND