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Cystic Fibrosis
What are the symptoms?
Some 15% of newborn infants with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) develop intestinal obstruction soon after birth due to their bowel contents being abnormally sticky (meconium ileus) and some need an urgent operation to relieve and bypass the blockage. Other frequent symptoms of CF can include a troublesome cough, repeated chest infections, prolonged diarrhoea and poor weight gain.
Cystic Fibrosis affects the pancreas, and the severe reduction in digestive enzymes, makes it difficult for most people with CF to digest their food. This can cause prolonged diarrhoea, poor weight gain and malnutrition, which can lead to poor growth, physical weakness and delayed puberty. Pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy can usually control the bowel symptoms.
In older patients, insulin production becomes deficient due to increasing pancreatic damage and some adults develop CF-related diabetes mellitus. Also a few develop liver disease. Older people with CF are prone to develop osteoporosis (thin, brittle bones) due to the nutritional and other problems involved with the disease.
Finally although women with CF do produce healthy, fertile eggs and many have had healthy children, most men with CF are infertile. Although they are normally sexually potent and have normal sperm, the tubes that carry them from the testes to the outside are not developed; but fortunately, with modern techniques of sperm aspiration and in vitro fertilisation, men with CF can now father their own children.
Background
| What are the causes? 
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