How To Recognize If You're Having Silent Reflux

they've been seen by an ear nose and throat doctor and had sort of an exam there first and sometimes they'll see commonly redness on their vocal cords and they say well maybe you're having silent reflex, right? And so, so the patient will say well no, I don't have any symptoms of sort of feeling like they have a sour sensation in my mouth. I don't feel food

coming up after I eat. I don't have any symptoms of sort of that burning sensation. I don't have those symptoms. So that's why they'll get the name of sort of what it's a silent reflex. Sometimes they're put on by the time they see me usually some of my days put them on acid reducing medication either a potent proton pump inhibitor or an H2 blocker and usually

are coming to see me disabled. Do I have as what else do I need to do? And so what I do is the history first. So what symptoms are you having what prompted you to start having work up in the first place. And then we go down the road of trying to understand if you actually indeed have reflex. Sometimes patients will have an ENT exam and

just because you have you know red vocal cords is very pretty subjective sometimes as it necessarily means it's from reflex. So sometimes we'll do based on symptoms of get people off medications do some diets every changes talk about things that could possibly be triggers. Sometimes reflex can sort of have a typical sort of presenting symptoms. Waking up with a sore throat or having a sour mouth

or cough. And so or whoresnice or anything of one of those things. And so we'll do an upper endoscopy first to see if there's any sort of damage to the bottom of the esophagus that could be caused by sort of a constant acid exposure called esophageitis. And this is a grading criteria that we have. If a person has a high it'll hurt you. There's sort of

more risk for having sort of their bottom of their esophagus sort of bathing in that that acid. And sometimes doing sort of some specialized testing like Bravo's studies, which is a little camera. We can a little test that we can send. So we can put in the bottom of the esophagus to measure that acid acidity as well or a pH and ptis pro, which also patients

does was a little bit cooler because you can press a button when a patient has both actually when you have symptoms and it sort of can send. The that will be able to measure exactly what your pH is at that time to be able to correlate is when you're having symptoms and actual time and when you have a very low pH. This is one how we're

able to decide if you're sort of initially presented with our actually due to acid reflux or not. And so I think that is what's commonly sort of known as sort of silent reflux. There's also other sort of things that talk about non acid reflux as well. So that is when we use those similar tests to determine if what patients are feeling is actually due to sort

of acid or is it just a sensation where they're hyper sensitive where they feel something going up into their esophagus, but it's not actually in something that's acidic. So there's nothing to add to that is that if there's a concern about silent reflux or ENT does see something and there's concern of reflux. If we do an endoscopy, which we usually will, if there is something called

barit's esophagus, those are cell changes that occur in the bottom of the esophagus that put you at increased risk for developing esophageal cancer. So many patients might have silent reflux, but they're actually having acid events that are affecting the esophagus. Those cell changes can be quite dangerous. So we just need to be monitored closely on the right medications and repeat endoscopies to make sure that it

doesn't turn into esophageal cancer.