SCHOOLTEACHER Jonathan Friel has told how severe gut pain as a teenager left him unable to stand up.

Mr Friel, 23, from Kilsyth in North Lanarkshire, was eventually diagnosed with ulcerative colitis aged 17.

He said: “I’d had symptoms for about two years and I never really did anything about it.

“I used to play football quite a lot and it would always happen after the game.

“But eventually it just became unbearable, to the point where I couldn’t play football anymore, and sometimes I couldn’t even go to school

“The pain is really hard to describe. Some times you can’t even stand up.”

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Mr Friel, a secondary school French teacher, shared his experience as new figures revealed that the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) - an umbrella term for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease - is twice as high as previously thought.

Scientists at Edinburgh University who have studied patient records from Lothian dating back as far as 1990 estimate that one in 125 people living in Scotland have one of the conditions - equivalent to around 43,000 people.

By 1990, they predict that this will have increased to 55,000 - or one in every 98 people.

Dr Gareth-Rhys Jones, who led the study, said: “I think what this shows is that we have historically underestimated how common this condition is.

“The rates that we are reporting in Edinburgh are double what has previously been reported in the UK.”

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He added that the team were “very confident” that the incidence found in the Edinburgh area would be the same for Scotland as a whole.

Symptoms of IBD include extreme fatigue, bloating, abdominal pain, weight loss, severe diarrhoea and blood in poo.

It is unclear what causes it, but it is significantly more common in Western societies. In China, incidence has shot up in recent years as Westernisation grows.

Dr Jones said: “There seems to be something bad about a Western lifestyle that predisposes you to gut inflammation.”

Since 2017, Mr Friel has been taking four tablets a day to help control his symptoms.

He said: “I’ve felt more positive and really well recently, so hopefully that continues.”