Feeling overwhelmed by the sensation that you’re going to be sick is one of the most miserably debilitating experiences — pity, then, people who live with nausea, feeling severely sick for days, weeks, even months on end.
Experts say that for many people living with long-term conditions, the nausea this causes can be the worst part of their illness.
‘It is so debilitating that it stops people living their daily lives,’ says Gareth Sanger, a professor of neuropharmacology at the Blizard Institute at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
‘Research has found that patients are so desperate to escape chronic nausea that they say they would even be prepared to gamble on taking a theoretical pill that would have a 50/50 chance of curing them or killing them. It’s that bad.’
Experts say that for many people living with long-term conditions, the nausea this causes can be the worst part of their illness
Recent research found that a quarter of women affected by severe, persistent nausea and vomiting during pregnancy suffered suicidal thoughts as a result.
Chronic nausea is common, with as many as one in eight people suffering from it on a regular basis, and many more affected intermittently, according to experts including Dr Adam Farmer, a consultant gastroenterologist at the University Hospitals of North Midlands.
The causes range from chemotherapy to persistent stomach conditions (such as chronic indigestion). But it can also be a long-term effect of the winter vomiting virus and, more surprisingly, is linked to anxiety and depression — with at least one study suggesting that these conditions are such common triggers that patients should be checked for them before being sent for invasive tests for possible gastric causes.
Research published in General Hospital Psychiatry in 2002 found that patients with anxiety are three times more likely to suffer long-term nausea than people without the condition.
One theory is that brain chemicals released as a result of anxiety disrupt the balance of bacteria in the gut, with the knock-on effect of causing nausea.
Yet precisely because chronic nausea can be linked to psychological factors, it is sometimes not rigorously investigated, says Peter Whorwell, a gastroenterologist at the Wythenshawe Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Manchester. He adds: ‘It’s a very challenging symptom to diagnose and treat as there are so many different potential causes.’
Stark evidence of its harrowing effects emerged in a recent survey of women with hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), excessive nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. As well as revealing that a significant proportion of these women had suicidal thoughts, it found that 5 per cent said they’d terminated their pregnancies because of the condition, reported the journal Obstetric Medicine.
As many as 3.6 per cent of pregnancies are affected by HG — Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, famously suffered it while carrying all three of her children.
The impact of such prolonged nausea can persist long after the sensations have abated. Nearly 30 per cent of women with HG suffered postnatal depression compared with 7 per cent of women who didn’t have HG, according to a study of more than 200 mothers published last year in the journal BMJ Open by researchers from Imperial College London.
Despite being so prevalent and disabling, there are no reliable treatments for HG-induced nausea. Professor Catherine Williamson from King’s College London, who led the latest HG study, says there is an ‘urgent need’ for further research into its causes.
‘By answering these questions, we will be able to develop more effective treatments,’ she says.
The problem is that scientists still know very little about what actually causes nausea, says Professor Sanger.
He told Good Health: ‘We can now stop vomiting with drugs but you can be left with horrible inescapable nausea symptoms. We thought that nausea would be easier to stop than vomiting. The reverse has proved true.’
While vomiting is a physical
