Your Children May Have Given You Hemorrhoids

It’s usually things like old age and constipation that cause hemorrhoids, but there isn’t all that much research around on other possible causes.

An article in the American Journal of Gastroenterology offers one new avenue though: it says that your children may have something to do with it.

The research suggests that vaginal birth may have a lot to do with it.

It’s known that bowel habits change after pregnancy and that women who have given birth well often experience anorectal symptoms (which means those related to the anus and rectum), but little research has been done on the relationship between obstetrics and hemorrhoids.

The authors found this lack of research strange, given that women who give birth vaginally often have major changes in bowel movements and given the disruption to their anorectal anatomy.

To find out whether vaginal delivery made internal hemorrhoids more likely, they analyzed the information of 306 patients with an average age of 57.7 years.

They had all undergone both a colonoscopy and high-resolution anorectal manometry at a medical center between 2013 and 2017. The colonoscopy showed any internal hemorrhoids and the anorectal manometry revealed other anorectal characteristics such as defecation disorders.

The scientists also reviewed their subjects’ demographics, medication use, and obstetric history.

Patients with internal hemorrhoids were indeed older: 61.2 versus 54.8 years old.

Women with a record of prior vaginal delivery were more likely to have internal hemorrhoids than women with no such history: 50 percent vs 36.7 percent of them. This was especially true for those who reported constipation symptoms.

Once they excluded all possible factors that could have influenced their results, they found that women who had given birth vaginally were 2.2 times more likely than their peers were to have internal hemorrhoids.

In addition, older women were 3.3 times more likely than younger ones to struggle with these, while those with constipation had a 2.5 times greater risk of developing them.

One pregnancy-related condition that was not related to the hemorrhoids was dyssynergic defecation, which affects the muscles and nerves of the pelvic floor, making it hard to defecate.

The scientists concluded that the mechanism through which vaginal delivery leads to hemorrhoids is more complex than just a disruption of defecation.

This is no reason to avoid vaginal birth, of course, but it is something to keep in mind and plan for in case it occurs, especially when you’re older.

And if you have hemorrhoids already, why suffer? This method can get rid of years of pain in just weeks (sometimes days)…