What Can Your Stool Say About Your Health
Discover how an AI-powered app analyzes your stool to reveal hidden health insights.
https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/video/mark-pimentel?src=soc_yt
-TRANSCRIPT-
JOHN WHYTE: Welcome to Your Health on Tech. I’m Dr. John Whyte, the chief medical officer at WebMD. In medicine, we tend to focus on analyzing blood and doing X-rays and special imaging to help assess one’s health. Yet there often are simpler ways to check on one’s wellness. For instance, your stool can provide a great deal of information about your health. Its size, shape, color, and frequency can all give clues to tell you and your doctor how you’re doing. I get it. You might not want to look at it too closely. And you’re not really sure what’s normal. AI can help you out. There’s currently an app to help analyze stool samples. My guest today is Dr. Mark Pimentel. He’s the executive director of the Medically Associated Science and Technology Program as well as professor of medicine at Cedars-Sinai. Welcome, Mark, to Your Health on Tech.
MARK PIMENTEL
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here with you.
JOHN WHYTE
Mark, we’re all used to using urine to give some assessments about our health. We look at it in terms of kidney stones, diabetes, infections. What does our stool tell us about our health?
MARK PIMENTEL
Some patients are very fixated on what their poop looks like and how it’s being affected in their health and disease, and others are not. But poop can tell you a lot of things because it changes color. It changes form and shape. And so I think it has significant value and is undervalued.
JOHN WHYTE
You did a study that focused on this app for patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Can you tell us what your study showed and how the app worked?
MARK PIMENTEL
So let me start with a little background. When patients do irritable bowel syndrome studies or, to be frank, any study where the patient is required to provide the information, sometimes we get information that’s skewed. And I’m not saying the patient doesn’t know what they’re doing.
What I’m saying is if you have 10 bowel movements today, and somebody asks you at the end of the day to tell them what the average is for the day, are you going to report the last one, the first one? Are you going to be really good at averages with your guessing mind of what the day was like? Or are you going to take the worst one because that was the one that made you the most miserable?
So it’s a little inaccurate in that sense. And so what we came up with the idea is if you had an app, and you were to take photographs of your stool, the app does all the work for you. And this gives greater accuracy. And this is really important in IBS studies, especially because IBS is all about what the patient tells you in terms of response to help us develop new drugs.
JOHN WHYTE
Why are we so bad about assessing our own stool? We do it several times a week. We don’t necessarily have to do it every day. Yet when it comes to describing it, we may not be as accurate as we need to be.
I mean, I ask patients all the time, do you see blood in your stool? They don’t really know. We ask if they’re tarry or dark. Sometimes patients will say, I never look. Why are we so bad? I don’t think we’re as bad when we think about urine and some other issues.
MARK PIMENTEL
Well, a couple things. We never like to talk about stool because that’s a weird conversation. Second of all, even this week, I had a patient in my clinic. I’m a gastroenterologist, been a gastroenterologist for 27 years. And she says to me, says, this is a bit of an awkward conversation, but I’d like to tell you what my stool looks like. And I’m like, well, that’s not an awkward conversation. That’s part of our conversation today.
And then the third thing is– and you’ve probably experienced this yourself in seeing patients. Patients come to you, and you ask them, so how’s your stool? Oh, it’s fine. Well, tell me more. And then you learn that they’ve had diarrhea. Well, but I’ve had that for 10 years. So they assume it’s normal.
So all of these– and there’s other variations on the theme. All of these things mean you have to talk about stool. You have to understand what the patient is going through. And you can’t accept the patient saying, oh, yeah, it’s fine as an answer because it isn’t always fine because they don’t always understand what fine is.
https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/video/mark-pimentel?src=soc_yt