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How Does One Know If He Or She Has Gilbert’s

How Does One Know If He Or She Has Gilbert’s Disease?

Gilberts disease is a condition that has closely related symptoms as jaundice, in fact there had been several studies that say that some cases of jaundice is caused by Gilberts disease. A very thin line separates the two conditions and without professional help one may not be able to understand and determine which condition they are afflicted with.

Its difficult to understand why it is important to know the right condition you have if two conditions barely have a difference. The importance of knowing the right conditions that you are afflicted with is that knowing what condition you have can lead to easier treatment. Treating certain conditions requires knowing exactly the type of condition that you are experiencing. You cant really treat a flu with cough medicine right? It goes the same with every kind of condition that people experience.

Unfortunately though some conditions may not have a treatment or a cure. One of those conditions is Gilberts disease. This condition is not really damaging or harmful to the patient but it still causes a lot of discomfort. Gilberts disease causes fatigue and jaundice to a person.

Even if some conditions have no known cure or treatments it is still important to have it diagnosed properly to learn more about the condition and find a cure in the future. Going back to Gilberts disease if it has no known cure or treatment why do people still to have it diagnosed. For experts to be able to find more about the condition and to be able to find out more about how to treat it.

How do you find out if you are suffering from Gilberts disease? Is there a proven way to pinpoint the condition if Gilberts disease shares the same symptoms with jaundice? There is and you can consider following it if you have the time to examine yourself. Here is a short list of the ways and the steps to go through to systematically to find out if you have Gilberts disease.

Step number 1: If you have an inkling that you have Gilberts disease and you also found out that your family has a history of having it too, you should immediately look for the signs and symptoms of the diseases. One of the symptoms you have to look for is the symptom of jaundice. Those signs are yellowish skin and yellowish eyeballs, it may also be accompanied by swollen mucus membranes and running nose. Another symptom is fatigue due to physical stress (exercise, general stress, and illness). Other symptoms to look for include nausea, general sleepiness or tiredness, pain in the body.

Step number 2: Visit your family doctor and tell him about the symptoms and the signs that you are experiencing. You should also tell your doctor about your suspicion and your family history. This may narrow down the search for the condition you are experiencing. Telling your doctor your suspicions may help out a lot.

Step number 3: Besides testing the physical symptoms, your doctor will let you go through an indirect bilirubin blood test that will say whether the disease is at hand.

Step number 4: Once diagnosed, though there isnt a treatment for the condition your doctor can still treat the jaundice and the help relieve the pain or discomfort associated with the abdominal symptoms of Gilberts disease that can be present.

Gilbert’s Disease And Its Signs

Many people ask about Gilberts disease and how it affects a person, a lot of people are concerned about having it because there is a little knowledge that can be found about it and there only been a handful of people that are aware that they have it.

How can Gilberts disease go on unnoticed?

One of the main characteristics of Gilberts disease is that it is asymptomatic or it carries no symptoms in most patients. This makes detection and diagnosis really difficult for the doctors and for medical experts. Being asymptomatic in nature makes Gilberts disease one of the few conditions that little are known about. Clinical studies and experimentation is always important in the curing and early detection because the baseline for the condition can be set, the proper dosage for the medication and the duration of the treatment can be directed.

Another factor for the stealth of Gilberts disease is that it has no long term or short term damaging effects to people. This means that patients can live healthy and normal lives and even live to a ripe old age with no hindrances from the condition. The only clear indication that a person has Gilberts disease is if they have experienced jaundice. With only minor stomach pains and yellowish skin and eyes, Gilberts disease causes no great concern to some people.

Other symptoms connected to the condition is uncommon

The person suffering jaundice because of Gilberts disease does not usually cause any major problems, Jaundice is the condition where a person suffers from yellowish skin and eyes and a little stomach pain. However, a number of people with Gilberts disease account other symptoms, the majority of these symptoms are: tiredness, mild weakness, mild abdominal pains and mild nausea. It is not apparent whether these symptoms are in fact connected to Gilberts disease. It is likely that they will build up from time to time due to unsupported nervousness concerning the condition. There does not appear to be any association amid these symptoms and the level of bilirubin in the blood. That is, these symptoms may develop irrelevant to whether or not the level of bilirubin is high or normal.

If the height of bilirubin goes higher than a definite level you turn out to be jaundiced. This is because bilirubin is an orangey-yellow color. A few people with Gilberts disease grow to be a little jaundiced now and then. This might appear to be upsetting, but is of little alarm if the cause is Gilberts disease. It is quite common to be jaundiced if you are a patient of Gilberts disease.

More on the process of breaking down the bilirubin

Jaundicea condition brought about by high levels of bilirubin in the blood stream. For people suffering from Gilberts disease it is caused by the inability of the liver to produce an enzyme that breaks down the bilirubin in the blood and to transfer it to the gut in the form of bilecan be caused by a lot of different diseases of the liver and blood. As a result, if you contract jaundice you are expected to call for tests to make clear the reason and to discard the chance of a serious disease. A blood test can more often than not confirms the diagnosis of Gilberts disease as it demonstrates a mildly raised level of bilirubin and confirms the non-existence of a serious disease.

Diagnosing Gilbert’s Disease

There are times when people go through a certain stage in their lives when they need to understand and adjust to certain changes in the way that they live. Some people are burdened with adjusting to getting married, losing a loved one or acquiring a disease or a medical condition. Of all the three, getting diagnosed with a medical condition can be the hardest to adjust to especially if you found out that you have been living with it for all your life. Hereditary diseases like Gilberts disease are one of those that we can acquire and not know about for a long time.

One of the reasons why we can live without knowing the presence of Gilberts disease is that the condition itself has no symptom or noticeable effect. Some people can even live through the rest of their lives without even knowing.

Just because it has no symptom it doesnt mean that it should not be consulted. People sometimes have the wrong notion of not going to a specialist if they suspect that they have Gilberts disease. So why is it important to have your condition diagnosed? Well there are several reasons but lets just look at one and that is for proper identification of the solution for the the problem, once we have the right diagnosis we can move on to taking care of the person who is sick.

Exclusion of other conditions

While this syndrome Gilberts disease is considered to be harmless by itself, it is clinically important to be diagnosed and identified correctly because it may be confused with much more dangerous liver conditions. However, these will show other indicators of liver dysfunction:

– Hemolysis can be excluded by a full blood count, haptoglobin, lactate dehydrogenase levels and the absence of reticulocytosis (elevated reticulocytes in the blood would usually be observed in haemolytic anaemia);

– Hepatitis can be excluded by negative blood samples for antigens specific to the different hepatitis vira;

– Cholestasis can be excluded by the absence of lactate dehydrogenase, low levels of conjugated bilirubin and ultrasound scan of the bile ducts;

– More severe types of glucoronyl transferase disorders like Crigler-Najjar syndrome (types I and II). These are much more severe and cause brain damage in infancy (type I) and teenage years (type II);

Other diseases of the liver can be exluded by the liver-enzymes ALAT, ASAT and albumin being within normal ranges.

Findings specific to Gilberts syndrome

Patients with Gilberts disease show predominantly elevated unconjugated bilirubin. While conjugated is usually within normal ranges and form less than 20 percent of the total. The level of total bilirubin is often increased if the blood sample is taken after fasting for two days, and a fast can therefore be useful diagnostically. If the total bilirubin does in fact increase while fasting, the patient can then be given low doses of phenobarbital when fasting has ended, and following samples should show a decrease in total bilirubin toward normal levels.

Once the findings have been reported, the patient with Gilberts disease should be more careful and should follow what the physician says. It will also be helpful for him or her to conduct a research so he or she can take care of themselves at home or if they cannot go to the doctor regularly. It is also best to watch diet carefully, conduct regular exercise, and take necessary medications or undergo treatments when needed.

Connecting Liver Disease And Gilbert’s Disease

The human liver is one of the most important organs of the body. It is responsible for cleaning our internal organs of the entire gunk and bile that is deposited by a person on a regular basis. But conditions like Gilberts disease and other forms of liver disease makes our livers weak and prone to breaking down.

To understand better how the liver is affected by different kinds of diseases and the impact of these conditions to our body. Liver disease is a general term used in describing any kind of sickness affecting the liver. Many of theses conditions are accompanied by jaundice caused by the heightened levels of bilirubin in the system. The bilirubin is the product of the breakup of the hemoglobin of dead red blood cells; usually, the liver takes away bilirubin from the blood and excretes it through bile.

The following are some of the known conditions that are considered as liver diseases:

– Hepatitis. This is the inflammation of the liver. This caused mainly by different kinds of viruses, there are also times that it is caused by some poisons, even hereditary conditions.

– Cirrhosis. This is the formation of fibrous tissue in the liver, the fibrous tissue takes the place of dead liver cells.

– Haemochromatosis. This is a hereditary disease caused by too much iron in the body causing liver damage.

– Cancer of the liver. This is usually coming from other parts of the body that is also affected by cancer. Usually, when cancer cells metastasis, it reaches the liver and it starts spreading from there.

– Wilsons disease. This condition is hereditary and copper deposits in the body cause it.

– Budd-Chiari syndrome. This is caused by the obstruction of the persons hepatic vein.

– Gilberts syndrome. This is a genetic disorder of bilirubin metabolism, found in about 5 percent of the population.

– Glycogen storage disease type II. Here, the build-up of glycogen causes progressive tissue weakness (myopathy) throughout the body and affects various body tissues, particularly in the heart, skeletal muscles, liver and nervous system.

There are also many pediatric liver diseases, including biliary atresia, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, alagille syndrome, and progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis, to name but a few.

A number of liver function tests are available to test the proper function of the liver. These test for the presence of enzymes in blood that are normally most abundant in liver tissue, metabolites or products.

Symptoms of a diseased liver

There are a few external signs that we could include to determine a diseased liver, some of those external signs are a coated tongue, bad breath, skin rashes, itchy skin, excessive sweating, offensive body odor, dark circles under the eyes, red swollen and itchy eyes, acne rosacea, brownish spots and blemishes on the skin, flushed facial appearance or excessive facial blood vessels.

There are other symptoms to look out for and they include jaundice, dark urine, pale stool, bone loss, easy bleeding, itching, small, spider-like blood vessels visible in the skin, enlarged spleen, fluid in the abdominal cavity, chills, pain from the biliary tract or pancrea, and an enlarged gallbladder.

The improper digestion and absorption of fats may lead to symptoms that include indigestion, reflux, hemorrhoids, gall stones, intolerance to fatty foods, intolerance to alcohol, nausea and vomiting attacks, abdominal bloating, and constipation. Unfortunately, some liver diseases like Gilberts disease are known to share symptoms with other liver diseases. So its better to consult a professional.