5. Pale-Colored Stool: An Overlooked Indicator
Pale-colored stool probably isn’t something you regularly check for, but maybe you should. The color of your stool can provide a surprisingly accurate snapshot of your bile duct health. In cholangiocarcinoma cases, a pale or clay-colored stool is often a subtle sign of blocked bile ducts.
If you think about it, your stool color is a visual diary of what’s going on inside your digestive system. Bile plays a key role in breaking down fats and also imparts a brown color to your stool. When bile ducts are blocked, there’s less bile in your digestive tract, leading to a pale-colored stool.
Ever heard of steatorrhea? It’s a condition characterized by excess fat in stools, and it can co-occur with pale stools in cholangiocarcinoma patients. Blocked bile ducts can prevent fat from being properly digested, leading to a higher fat content in your stools, making them float and appear oily.
The skin and eyes aren’t the only things that can turn yellow due to a bile duct obstruction. Sometimes the stool will take on a yellow hue too. That’s right; when bilirubin can’t exit the liver, it finds alternative routes, and in some cases, it gets excreted via the stool.
Don’t dismiss the signs your body is giving you, even if they appear to be “trivial” like the color of your stool. It’s a clue, a small piece of a larger puzzle that could point to something as serious as cholangiocarcinoma. (5)
