In its time, the World Health Organization has developed a regulatory document to provide a unified approach to the classification of medical diagnoses. Currently, the tenth version of the document - ICD-10 is in use.
ICD-10 is used for the convenience of describing the disease and its attendant other diseases. Composed of 21 sections, the document includes subsections and codes of known diseases. The difficulty in determining diarrhea in ICD-10 is that diarrhea accompanies a variety of diseases that may not be associated with the gastrointestinal tract at all.
Types of diarrhea are classified according to the mechanisms that promote their development and distinguish:
- Osmotic diarrhea, which develops due to a violation of the absorption process, when insufficiently digested food and individual medicines create an increased pressure in the lumen of the intestine that holds water.
- Hyperkinetic diarrhea, in which diarrhea is caused by overactive muscular contractions of the intestine. As a rule, this type of diarrhea is observed with an irritated bowel and with an elevated content of thyroid hormones.
- Exudative diarrhea, is typical for inflammatory processes in the intestine and develops when fluid enters the intestinal lumen from small blood vessels.
- Secretory diarrhea, in which an increased amount of water and sodium is released into the lumen of the intestine. In this case, it does not stop even when there is no food, but only the volume of secretions decreases. This kind of diarrhea is caused by the harmful effects of bacteria or viruses on the mucous membrane.
Among the main causes of diarrhea can be called:
- reception of chemotherapeutic agents;
- frequent use of laxatives( buckthorn bark, senna leaf);
- specific tumors;
- disturbances of absorption of bile acids after resection of the ileum.
In clinical practice, diarrhea is classified according to the duration and type of lesion of the intestinal mucosa. For proper determination of diarrhea according to ICD-10, laboratory and instrumental examinations are carried out. Nosological classification of ICD-10 diarrhea of an infectious nature refers to codes A00-A09.Non-infectious diarrhea is classified according to ICD-10 code K52.9.If the relationship of diarrhea to other diseases is determined, the ICD-10 code is established for the underlying disease.