Posted 7/9/2010 8:01 AM (GMT 0)
HI everyone, I am feeling pretty positive today.
I have been doing a LOT of reading and research, mainly because I have been feeling so bad and yet the tests are all relatively normal. This has been very puzzling and troubling to me, until I decided to have a look at LPR. Docs have been bandying around words like "acid" and "reflux" and so on, but no one has given me any real diagnosis. Well, the LPR symptoms could have been written by me! I found out some really interesting stuff, maybe this article will help others:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BUM/is_9_81/ai_92281754/?tag=rbxcra.2.a.11
it really helped me understand why my symptoms aren't yet responding to treatment, especially the paragraph explaining:
Compared with the esophagus, the larynx is exquisitely sensitive to peptic injury. According to normative pH-monitoring data, the upper limit of normal (mean plus two standard deviations) for the total number of esophageal reflux (GERD) episodes per 24 hours is approximately 50. In contrast, it has been shown experimentally that as few as three reflux (LPR) episodes per week can result in significant laryngeal damage. It takes much less acid/pepsin exposure to cause tissue damage in the pharynx and larynx than in the esophagus. In a manner of speaking, the larynx is approximately 100 times more sensitive to peptic injury than is the esophagus.
The article also said that may of the GERD diagnostic tests come back negative for LPR sufferers, the PH one being an exception. I hope they give me that one before the motility/manometry, since this stated that the manometry tests generally come back normal for LPR.
There are some other very informative articles in the links at the side too, hopefully they will be helpful for some people here.
Stay Well
Liz xx