Heartburn: Hints on Dealing

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (or GERD) causes many painful symptoms in sufferers. These symptoms can include:

• chest pain
• difficulty swallowing
• a feeling of food trapped in your throat
• hoarseness upon rising
• a sensation of choking,
• bad breath that you can not eliminate no matter what you do
• a persistent dry, hacking cough

Let's look at a few ways that GERD is diagnosed.

Usually, your doctor will start by prescribing a series of acid-suppressive drugs on a trial basis to see if they do the trick. If the drugs are effective, it then it is often assumed that the diagnosis is GERD. If not, then other medical tests are required to determine the cause of the symptoms.

One of the more common tests for GERD is an upper endoscopy (also referred to as esophagogastroduodenoscopy or, more simply, as an EGD).

In an EGD the doctor uses an endoscope to take a closer look at the inner walls of the esophagus as well as the duodenum--the beginning of the small intestine--and the stomach.

The endoscope resembles a thin, lighted tube, flexible enough to move easily. Using this, the doctor can easily see both the walls of the stomach and the tissue lining the upper part of the digestive tract.

Along with the EGD, a a doctor will sometimes do a biopsy of the stomach or esophagus in order to rule out cancer as a cause of the heartburn.

Another procedure that is commonly ordered is the . This test is fairly uncomfortable for the patient, as it involved a thin tube with a sensor on the end, being sent down their nose and throat and remaining in place for the length of the examination

This procedure helps to measure the amount of acid that is being "refluxed" into the esophagus and how quickly it is rising. Let's take a closer look at this procedure.

To begin the procedure the doctor delicately inserts a tube through the patient's nose and down his throat until it enters the esophagus. As its name suggests, this test spans 24-hours. The sensor tube is connected to a device resembling a Walkman which measures how long acid from the stomach takes to make its way to the esophagus, and for how long it remains there.

The patient is responsible for keeping a record of his symptoms and recording them. At the end of the 24-hour period, the recorded data is analyzed, with close attention paid to the frequency and severity of the symptoms.

The PH monitoring examination is typically used with patients that experience recurring heartburn symptoms but the endoscopy results are normal and they have not seen relief with the acid-suppressive therapy.

Barium x-rays are sometimes used to diagnose heartburn sufferers with certain symptoms. The patient is given a barium-laced drink to ingest, and the liquid coats the the stomach walls and the esophagus. X-rays are then taken to help identify hiatus hernias, erosions or strictures, and ulcers.

Sometimes it is also possible to watch as the esophagus empties itself of food and liquids on a barium x-ray. Even so, barium x-rays are not very effective at diagnosing GERD on their own, and because of this they are often combined with other diagnostic procedures to obtain a proper diagnosis.

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