Have you ever felt a burning sensation in your chest that can feel like it’s racing up towards your throat? Or a sour taste in the back of your mouth after meals? Perhaps you’ve even had difficulty swallowing or have experienced a sensation of something being “stuck” in your throat? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you join millions of others who suffer from symptoms of acid reflux .
In order to talk about how acid reflux can cause symptoms that affect your body let’s first look at the disease itself. Acid reflux is a condition where stomach acid flows back into the esophagus through relaxation of a sphincter or valve called the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) that joins the esophagus and the stomach. Certain foods and conditions can also aggravate this condition such as smoking, obesity and pregnancy. Typically individuals become aware of having acid reflux once they become symptomatic.
These symptoms can range in intensity from a minor nuisance that you barely take note of to a moderate annoyance causing you to make changes in your diet and obtain medical advice to more severe symptoms that can drive you to seek immediate urgent medical attention. Let us review five main symptoms in more detail:
Acid Reflux Symptoms
1) Heartburn – defined as a burning sensation that you can feel in your lower chest and throat. This mainly occurs after meals when food you ingested trigger a release of acid in the stomach to help break it down. This acid then makes its way through the LES to the esophagus.
2) Regurgitation – described commonly as a sour tasting liquid in the mouth sometimes mixed with food particles from the stomach. When this occurs acid has refluxed from your stomach into your oral cavity via the esophagus.
3) Dysphagia – translated to mean “difficulty swallowing”. Typically occurs when inflammation or motility disorders affect the esophagus. Dysphagia can also be a marker for esophageal cancer.
4) Laryngitis – inflammation of the laryngeal or vocal chords. This is characterized often by hoarseness or a feeling of a lump in your throat. Laryngitis can occur from acid refluxing from the stomach up through the esophagus into the mouth and down again touching the vocal cords as it travels down your windpipe (trachea).
5) Chronic Cough – the same mechanism that can occur in laryngitis occurs with those who experience a chronic cough from acid reflux. As the stomach acid travels down the trachea it continues to the airways in the lungs. The lungs then try and clear this liquid by coughing. A chronic cough related to acid reflux can sometimes occur without any other symptoms of reflux therefore making it harder to diagnosis and evaluate.
Other less common symptoms can include chest pain, bronchospasm, nausea, or pain with swallowing (odynophagia). If you do relate to any of the symptoms above, a helpful step would be to start keeping a food diary where you write down when the symptoms occur, how long they last, what precipitated them and what made them resolve. By doing this you may be able to isolate triggers to this condition that you can avoid to help with your symptoms.
In addition to keeping a food diary, try eating smaller meals more frequently, sitting or standing upright for three hours after eating prior to lying down, and walking after meals to help move food through your digestive track faster. If you smoke or are obese, remember that these are significant contributors to acid reflux as well and symptoms may decrease significantly with smoking cessation or weight loss.
Some of these symptoms are very general and not specific to just acid reflux. You should consult with your medical professional if they begin to intensify in frequency or become more severe.
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