Digestive Disorders

Most people have a problem with their digestion at some time in their lives. Heartburn (a burning feeling moving up from the stomach to the throat), stomach pain, and bloating (feeling full of gas and needing to belch or pass wind) are all very common. They may be worse after a meal or at night.

Digestive problems are often caused by acid from the stomach. This can lead to ulcers in the stomach or intestine, or inflammation in the oesophagus – the tube that carries food from the mouth to the stomach. Acid isn’t the only cause of digestive problems.

Most digestive problems can be treated with medicines.

Treating digestive disorders

Digestive disorders are diverse in nature.

A number of pathologies with digestive symptoms are in fact inflammatory in origin, for example Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Some others are linked to changes in the gastrointestinal blood pressure. This is the case when the liver becomes fibrotic (for example in cirrhosis) and becomes an obstacle to the normal blood flow, causing high blood pressure locally. This may lead to bleeding from varices in the oesophagus. Vasoactive treatments control this type of bleeding and reduce the risk that it will start again.

The treatment of heartburn and stomach pain has come a long way in the last 30 years. Millions of people around the world now routinely take medicines to relieve their symptoms by suppressing the amount of acid they make in their stomach. Histamine blockers (also called H2 antagonists) provide a smooth reduction in acid that gives the inflamed lining of the stomach, intestine or oesophagus a chance to heal.

Until recently, the main drawback of histamine blockers was that, once treatment was stopped, the digestive problem was likely to come back. However, newer treatments have been designed to reduce the risk of recurrence. Proton pump inhibitors achieve rapid and sustained decrease in acidity in the stomach.

Ulcers destroy the surface tissue on the inside of the stomach and when they reach blood vessels, they start to bleed. At this stage, simply decreasing the acidity of the stomach will not solve the problem. As for bleeding esophageal varices, vasoactive treatments are available to control bleeding due to ulcers and to decrease the risk of recurrent bleeding. These drugs can also prevent complications after digestive surgery or after certain endoscopic procedures.