Diagnosis

For a variety of reasons, clinicians often struggle to arriveat a confident diagnosis of IBS. The differential diagnosis in patients who  have symptoms that are suggestive of IBS is broad and there is no reliable biologic marker for this condition. IBS is viewed more often as a "diagnosis by exclusion" than as a primary diagnose. The manning criteria, Rome I and Rome II criteria, developed by multinational working groups, provide a uniform framework for the selection of patients in diagnostic and therapeutic trials of IBS.