Abdominal Pain Caused by...Air Pollution?

A major cause of emergency room visits, especially by young women, is abdominal pain. When no cause can be found for this pain, it is called non-specific abdominal pain. It is a confounding diagnosis, and so far, a trigger for this pain has eluded researchers.

Gilaad Kaplan, MD, assistant professor of medicine, University of Calgary, studied the records of 95,000 people with non-specific abdominal pain in Edmonton, Alberta and 25,000 in Montreal, Quebec. Kaplan and his research team correlated the dates of these emergency room visits along with the levels of air pollution. They discovered that when air pollution was higher, young women were more likely to seek medical care at a hospital emergency room for non-specific abdominal pain.

Kaplan is presenting the results from this study this week at Digestive Disease Week in Chicago.