Small Bowel Disease

If your short bowel is damaged by disease or trauma, then you may have intestinal failure. Intestinal failure is the loss of the absorptive capacity of the small bowel.

A common cause for children is short gut syndrome, a congenital disorder in which an infant's intestine is too short or underdeveloped to allow normal food digestion.

Adults with small bowel disease often have undergone prior surgery, had part of the intestine removed, or have developed a problem with the motility of the intestine. These problems require a patient to live on intravenous feeding or TPN (total parenteral nutrition). Among other causes are:

Most patients with small bowel disease develop diarrhea, dehydration, and require an intravenous line for hydration and nutrition. Patients with motility disorders often experience bloating, abdominal distension and vomiting, and have trouble eating.

If your small bowel is not working well enough to absorb the fluid and nutrition you need on a daily basis, you are probably on total parenteral nutrition (TPN). TPN is a liquid filled with all the nutrients your body needs to survive, given through a central line right into the blood stream. By putting nutrients right into the blood stream, TPN does the job of the small bowel. However, this is not a long-term solution for most patients. We may recommend a small bowel transplant.

Our small bowel transplant team members are dedicated to supporting our transplant patients, from the first steps in their journey, to transplantation, to managing their healthy organ for life.

Small bowel transplantation is the transplantation of a new intestine to an individual with irreversible intestinal failure. The purpose of this transplant is to restore intestinal function so patients can eat again and not require TPN. It is used to treat intestinal failure when other treatments, such as parenteral nutrition (intravenous tube feeding or TPN) are not successful.