Contest: "heartburn ,causes ,prevention"

 

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Hello my dear Steemians,

 

Today I wanted to take part in the challenge running by @suboohi if you got interested please visit this link:

https://steemit.com/hive-168205/@suboohi/contest-alert-heartburn-causes-prevention

 

Heartburn

 

When I saw this name of contest I immediately decided to take part, are you curious why? The reason is because this is one of the conditions that I perform investigation for and it is once a week when I am running special tests in order to assess how bad is heartburn or we better say reflux.

 

Heartburn: causes

 

There are many causes of Heartburn and some of them temporarily coming and going and the causes are easy to eliminate, often we already know what it causes and we have some home remedies.

Common causes:

• excess of alcohol, that increases production of stomach acid
• too much acid containing fruits
• late meal when people go to bed with still relatively full stomach
• Obesity, if we have high BMI that usually causes the increase of intra-abdominal pressure on stomach and diaphragm and the people with high BMI are very prone to have Heartburn
• some medication may causes more acid production of stomach and those medications are: steroids, pain killers like Ibuprofen and its group

When such situation happens, there are also simple remedies that we can use:

• very common old wisdom is Milk
• Sodium bicarbonate and bicarbonate of soda are other names for baking soda: that means we can neutralise acid with alkaline, almost every house has baking powder
• Very easy is to avoid alcohol, late meals
• if you need to take pain killers make sure that you have something to eat

 

Heartburn or Reflux disease: Endoscopy

 

*When heartburn is not getting better and needs some medication to protect stomach then patient might need further investigations. Often we start with Endoscopy to check if there is any damage from acid to mucous layer of your gullet and that can show if there is a damage of mucous, that is easily seen using Endoscopy, there are four different Grade of it and depending how severe inflammation it will depend how high the medication need to be dosed.

Last weekend I had my Endoscopy on weekend and this is my working area. We often have patients whose General Practitioners will refer them for the test.

 

 

Heartburn or Reflux disease: Manometry and ph study

 

After Endoscopy and if it confirms that patient has bad reflux or heartburn affecting the gullet then it will be investigation if there is any problem with motility of gullet that means the next step is Manometry and ph study. I like manometry because it is very informative and let us to find out if the motility of gullet is intact or now.

When a person has normal manometry but very bad Heartburn then the next step after failed conservative treatment with medication is Surgical treatment and that is why we surgeons need those investigation done before we operate.

 

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If manometry is normal then patient gets PH study which is a study when a fine PH catheter is placed via nostril into stomach and left for 24 hours, that is then measuring acid during 24 hours, patient also documents diary of symptoms.

The surgery for therapy resistant treatment is keyhole and nowadays a day procedure. Many patient benefit from it and actually majority can stop immediately their medication.

*Hope that it was not too much technical as I tried to write in simple words. Thank you @suboohi it was a pleasure to have such topic and be able to share my knowledge for it.

 

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I would like to invite @lusciouslucy, @maryemolinet and @jes88 to this contest

 

 

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