"The Mystery of My Burning Esophagus"
"The Mystery of My Burning Esophagus"
As a science writer, I’ve spent years covering the rise of allergic conditions. Why couldn’t I figure out my own?
A very interesting article about an individual's personal struggle with a not very well known condition - eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE).
My year of torment began with a brutal headache. The pain came on gradually over several weeks, as if some part of my brain were being slowly squeezed in a vise. Darkness lapped at the edge of my vision. Over-the-counter painkillers didn’t help. Occasionally, a dementia-like loss of vocabulary struck, often when I was talking to people over the phone. I found myself unable to recall easy things like “Washington, D.C.” or “George Clooney.” I’d end up staring at my computer without any inkling of what I’d sat down to do....
Archive link https://archive.ph/rINFl
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During my years of interviewing doctors, I haven’t been able to help noticing the exasperation some of them feel toward patients who look for medical guidance online — what one of those physicians once called Dr. Google — and then come into the office making demands based on what is often incomplete information or outright misinformation.
Elizabeth Jensen, an associate professor of epidemiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and her colleagues have found that having been breastfed — which, along with its other benefits, is thought to cultivate a healthier microbial garden in the infant gut — is protective against the disease, for example, but so far only in children with certain gene variants suspected of making the esophageal barrier more permeable.
Conversely, antibiotics taken early in life are associated with an increased risk of EoE later, according to Jensen’s research (a pattern also observed in studies of those with asthma, pediatric-onset inflammatory bowel disease and pediatric autoimmune arthritis).
Now that I knew what ailed me, and had a treatment regimen that was at least controlling the problem, I saw disparate-seeming episodes that had distressed me going back decades in a new light: a painful lump in my throat in my 20s that I attributed to stress; an occasional sensation of breathlessness, also in my 20s, that I thought was allergies.
It might be that any irritation in the esophagus, whether from an upward surge of acid or inflammation spurred by a food allergy, could be interpreted as originating in the lungs — or even the heart — and a body might respond, as mine apparently did, with the panic of someone who’s drowning.
A few years ago, Rima Rachid, the director of the Allergen Immunotherapy Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her colleagues gave 10 adult volunteers with peanut allergies microbes from nonallergic donors.
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