Hemorrhoids Increase Your Risk of This Painful and Unsightly Condition

Hemorrhoids are no fun. They’re swollen veins near the anus, so you can bet they have the power to make bathroom visits miserable for sufferers.

You can think of them as being like varicose veins, because they share similar features.

In fact, researchers in Turkey noticed the two conditions were alike which made them wonder if they might tend to co-exist, and they published their findings in the journal Cureus.

Varicose veins are enlarged and twisted, colored blue or purple by the blood that pools inside them. They’re most commonly found in your legs because they’re working against gravity to return blood to your heart.

They can’t do this effectively if the valves that are meant to prevent backflow become too weak to close, so blood can pool inside them, creating either full varicose veins or slimmer spider veins.

Hemorrhoids have a wide variety of causes including constipation, diarrhea, and excessive straining when moving your bowels, all of which can overstrain your veins.

And another common cause is sitting on the toilet for too long, which interferes with blood flow to and from your rectum. This can also cause blood to pool in the veins around your anus, enlarging and swelling them. That’s when we call them hemorrhoids.

To compare the two conditions, the researchers recruited 100 patients who had undergone surgery for internal or external hemorrhoids. They also recruited 100 people with no history of hemorrhoids for comparison.

The researchers asked both groups to stand for two minutes, then they looked for varicose veins – veins that met the clinical description developed by the 1994 American Venous Forum.

To exclude any other conditions which might possibly interfere with their findings, they asked their subjects to complete questionnaires on their general health, demographic information, lifestyles, and varicose veins risk factors.

This revealed that varicose veins were more common in the hemorrhoid group than in the group with no history of hemorrhoids. C1 and C2 varicose veins were 35 and 19 percent more common in the hemorrhoid group respectively.

In addition, chronic constipation was much more common in the group with the hemorrhoids and varicose veins than it was in the group without them; 78 percent compared with 29 percent.

The other risk factors for both of these conditions, things like older age, obesity, height, standing habits, and pregnancies and births did not differ between the groups.

This told the authors that chronic constipation may be a common cause of both conditions and could be responsible for their co-occurrence.

The good news is that you can rid yourself of hemorrhoids in a few days using this simple, natural approach…