Anyone with an IBS diagnosis or who has been experiencing IBS symptoms is potentially at risk, but you are more likely to have post-infectious IBS if:

• You have received a specific diagnosis of IBS-D (IBS with diarrhea-predominant symptoms) or IBS-M (IBS with mixed symptoms with diarrhea as one component)

• You experience chronic diarrhea, traveler’s diarrhea, or a mixture of diarrhea and constipation on an ongoing basis

• You have abdominal pain and bloating

• You have a sensation of incomplete emptying after bowel movements

• You have no other serious symptoms (such as blood in your stool)

• It’s possible you’ve had a foodborne illness (food poisoning) in the past

One of the most difficult aspects of knowing whether you may be at risk for PI-IBS is that foodborne illness is not always diagnosed or properly attributed. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that “each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.” This is a huge number! But only a small percentage of these cases are ever officially diagnosed and treated since the acute symptoms of food poisoning often resolve themselves without specific medical intervention.

Unfortunately, that means there could be unexpected long-term consequences of contracting these foodborne illnesses. And since there is sometimes a lag between contracting a foodborne illness and the onset of PI-IBS, it’s not always easy or possible to make the correlation. “You may not recall a history of food poisoning, and you may not remember a few days of diarrhea,” writes renowned gut-health expert Dr. Mark Pimentel in The Microbiome Connection. “In fact, your IBS symptoms may have begun several months after the initial food poisoning.”

For this reason, it’s important to take into account the other symptoms and risk factors–especially the presence of diarrhea–which research suggests is the most common indication of PI-IBS.