Stopped smoking 4 months before symptoms startef

The first (5-ASA) and second line (steroid) therapies for UC are far safer than smoking, and may be effective in knocking out your inflammation and preventing proximal disease extension in the future. Speaking from experience , proximal disease extension is a concern with proctitis.

There has been some debate as to whether low-dose smoking is as unsafe as immunomodulators and/or biologics for certain folks, but you’re not even close to making a decision like that, yet.

Once you have UC, you always have UC. Medications only tame the inflammation. Therefore, it is a good idea to be on a medication to quickly induce remission and then maintain remission. Medications will be recommended for LIFE with UC. Welcome to the club. I know.

Based on your post, I'll assume you don’t want to choose smoking as a means to induce and maintain remission, so here is my advice to you:

1. Max dose of oral 5-ASA daily
2. Max dose of rectal 5-ASA nightly
3. Reassess in 4-6 weeks

Once you’re able to achieve a solid remission, you may be able to taper the meds to a lower maintenance dose!

Good luck

There are a number of posters who were smokers, quit and got uc diagnoses. You've likely had uc undiagnosed for a long time but never knew it, because smoking masked your uc symptoms. Smoking makes the mucosal lining thicker, and that's a problem area in uc patients (it's usually thinner in uc patients).

Unfortunately once that pandora's box of uc is opened, there's no boxing it back up and undoing your uc. Some former smokers reintroduce smoking and it helps some in their symptom management. Others see no improvement. Something to try, but certainly while weighing the negative consequences of long-term smoking again.

Yes, quitting will cause UC in some people, including me.
Whether you had UC prior to starting smoking is up for debate.
Smoking is also associated with preventing the progression of the disease
from distal to proximal.
It is not just the nicotine and tars, but also the carbon monoxide, plus perhaps
the 4000 or so other chemicals in smoke, and or the bacteria in smoke.
So nasty expensive habit.
Last time I quite for more than a month 1986, flared. I am still in the same flare.
When I quit now, I can last about a month.
Get sever mouth ulcers, cant talk or eat, without the aid of 20% benzocaine.
Re-start ulcers gone in 2 days.
The next time I try to quit will load up on zinc.
I still smoke, still have UC, but still here.
Old Mike

Seriously, I quit smoking and then I got sick... Isn't that backwards-arse...

I asked my gastroenterologist once: Seems like a weird question to ask my doctor, but should I actually start smoking now that I have uc? He laughed and said no, and we talked a bit about how there could be some possible benefits. In the end, he said there's inherent health risks associated with smoking and therefore he cannot really recommend anything unless it's generally do no harm. Never smoked, nor do I plan to but I figured it's an interesting (and somewhat amusing) conversation to have with a doctor given the context.

@ipoop, just out of curiosity, did your parents smoke, did you grow up with smokers around you? Interesting, if you were not exposed to any sort of tobacco at all. My parents smoked but they gave it up when I was in high school.

I fooled around with cigs as a teen, smoked a little in my early 20's but was never that dedicated to it, never smoked tobacco since. I smoked a lot of MJ though, phased that out in my 30's but recently took it up again. I was well on my way to being better being on Humira, so don't think recent here and there vaping a little MJ has done a whole lot, except make a glass of red wine extra good. The "bud tender" I conferred with, she knew her stuff, sold me the perfect strain. It's not a totally in your face high and no major munchies, just mellow. My poops have been slamm'n good lately, finally.💩💩💩

And I did admit it to my doctor, he was pretty blasé about it. I'm in Orgon, legal, recreational weed is easily accessable, so I assume he's used to patients telling him they are on "the pot" lol, not the toilet one. He was the one who told me that some patients found smoking to give their UC relief in the first place but I suspect he didn't mean for me to take up vaping MJ. 😏

Sorry to hear you have had that experience, as others have said it is a story I have heard multiple times and crazily enough I'm sure there must be some connection. I guess it goes to show how complicated and practically impossible it can be to know how to live "healthily", as I doubt anybody would expect to be diagnosed with a lifelong chronic illness because they quit smoking. But I guess we still have to do our best and hope the choices work out well - there's no way you ever could have predicted that happening.

Ahh, yes, me too. Quit smoking at 61, in first full flare less than 6 months later. I was able to quit only with the help of e-cig. Which did NOT alleviate symptoms (so I don't believe it's the nicotine). Will never return to combustive tobacco however, as have heart and lung issues. Tried a smoke the other day and it made me wretch, almost like a poison would.

Now I know so much about IBD and IBS I realize I've had IBS my whole life and that manifested to IBD with the elimination of tobacco. Now they want me to quit drinking and that will probably kill me. Cheers!

I have been around smokers all my life, my dad kept smoking inside our house, when my mom got ashma, he started smoking outside and a couple of years later my UC showed up. I tried a nicotine patch a couple of months ago and I started bleeding heavily around 2 hours later. I don't know if anything at all can make you go into a flare so fast and to be honest, I already had diarhea for sometime when I tried the patch but I'm inclined to believe it somehow made me worse. So no luck for me.