Acid Reflux measured with your breath

It’s usually easy to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) with simple diet changes and exercises.

But sometimes that doesn’t work.

In that case, you might want to take a simple breath test according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology. This breath test can detect a hidden cause of your GERD, which is then quite easily treatable.

The authors of this study were frustrated by the difficulty of diagnosing RGERD. Traditionally, diagnosing RGERD involves invasive procedures like 24-hour esophageal pH monitoring, which is uncomfortable and often leads to low patient compliance. Therefore, they wondered whether a breath test could achieve the same goal.

The lactulose breath test measures concentrations of hydrogen and methane in our breath. These gases indicate the amount and types of bacteria in our small intestines.

So, the authors thought that, if bacterial overgrowth in our small intestines was responsible for RGERD, then this breath test might be able to diagnose it.

From June 2020 to December 2022, they studied 178 patients they recruited from the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University. They all suffered from GERD. Among them, 96 had non-refractory GERD (NRGERD), and 82 had RGERD.

They used the Gerd Q score, reflux symptom index score, and other clinical data to analyze the patients’ conditions.

This is what they found:

1. Patients with RGERD had a higher incidence of acid reflux (67.1%) and heartburn (65%) compared to those with NRGERD (42.7% and 34.4%, respectively).

2. Methane levels were significantly higher in RGERD patients than in those with NRGERD.

3. Long-term use of proton pump inhibitors, a common drug treatment for GERD, might contribute to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This could worsen the symptoms of RGERD.

4. For RGERD patients, those with higher methane levels experienced more abdominal pain, acid regurgitation, heartburn, and nausea.

The findings from this study suggest that measuring methane levels using a breath test could be a helpful tool in diagnosing RGERD.

But it also proves that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth is involved in causing a form of gastroesophageal reflux disease that is very resistant to treatment, which gives us a possible way to treat it.

There is however an easy way – explained here – to treat this type of GERD as well as any other type of acid reflux. It’s all natural and takes as little as five minutes…