Stomach Aches: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Talking to your doctor, Lifestyle changes and Treatment

Chief of gastroenterology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas The doctor Richard Boland says about Stomach Aches: everyone should know five things about serious digestive disorders.

Symptoms: If you have persistent symptoms, such as abdominal pain or discomfort, nausea, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, heartburn or blood in the stools Alert your doctor.

Diagnosis: Because many digestive disorders are not detectable with blood or imaging tests, they can be difficult to diagnosis. Irritable bowel syndrome, for instance, is usually diagnosed by first ruling out all other disorders.

Talking to your doctor and be frank: Symptoms and your health history play a major role in diagnosing digestive disorders, so be frank with your doctor. Recording your eating habits and symptoms in a journal and being honest about drinking and smoking habits can help the doctor determine your condition faster and more accurately.

Lifestyle changes: Knowing your habits can help you change them if they're causing your symptoms. Stomach pain that follows the consumption of dairy products, for example, could indicate lactose intolerance - a treatable condition that a change in diet can also help.

Treatment: First though changing eating habits is usually the first order of attack, it's not a cure-all. Depending on the condition, prescription medications, natural remedies, stress reducers and -- when necessary -- surgery are possible treatments to alleviate symptoms.

Quik test for melamine in milk developed by Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana

U.S. researchers have developed a quick way to test milk for the presence of melamine, an industrial chemical found last year in milk in China that killed at least six children and made thousands sick.

The analysis method uses a simplified version of a mass spectrometer, a tool that can be used to separate and identify molecules in compounds.

Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana said on Wednesday the method can detect tiny traces of the chemical in liquid and powdered milk in about 25 seconds.

The team developed the tool specifically to detect melamine, which was also found in contaminated pet food that killed thousands of dogs and cats in the United States in 2007.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last November issued guidelines limiting melamine in dairy products to 1 part per million or less.

"This situation created an immediate need for an analytical method that is highly sensitive, fast, accurate and easy to use," R. Graham Cooks, who led the team, said in statement.

"We took it as a challenge to use simpler instrumentation and to develop a faster method that allows the testing to be done on site," said Cooks, whose findings were published in the journal Chemical Communications.

Melamine, normally used to make plastics, has been found in milk powder, wheat gluten and other Chinese-made ingredients used in products ranging from pet food to candy.

Melamine's ability to make foods appear to have higher amounts of protein during testing has made it a cheap but dangerous substitute that can damage the kidneys.

Source: Reuters