Feb 12, 2024 06:44 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024...-condition
EXCERPTS: Lisa Thornton was heavily pregnant and in her early 30s when she noticed the feeling of a blockage in her oesophagus, the muscular food pipe that connects the mouth to the stomach. “At the time, I just thought it was just the pregnancy,” says Thornton, now 50, who lives in the New Forest in Hampshire. “I thought it was everything pushing up. But a few years later, things started to get worse.”
During a Sunday roast with her family, a chunk of broccoli suddenly lodged in her throat, causing spasms that persisted for hours. Any attempts to wash it down with water failed as the fluid simply came straight back up. Thornton drove to a nearby drop-in centre, where doctors tried, without success, to free the blockage with muscle relaxants.
After nearly 20 hours, she ended up in A&E. “I was put on a drip and the doctors started to talk about an operation to stretch my oesophagus to release the obstruction,” she remembers. “As a last-ditch attempt, a young doctor gave me morphine [which has a muscle relaxant effect as well as being a painkiller]. I woke up to find that, after 36 hours, the lump had finally cleared. It had been a violent, shocking experience and no one seemed to know why or how.”
But this was only the beginning. It would take another decade, and more incidents, before Thornton finally received a diagnosis: a little-known condition called eosinophilic oesophagitis (EoE), or asthma of the oesophagus.
[...] One 2022 study in Sweden even suggested that it could affect more than one in 1,000 individuals – twice as many. “That’s the highest current estimate, but it fits entirely with what we see in daily practice,” says Attwood. “More and more patients are coming through needing assessments for this swallowing difficulty and we know we’re diagnosing it more frequently.”
So what is going on? Hannah Hunter, an allergy dietitian at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, has been seeing patients with EoE for the past decade and points to various theories – ones that have also been linked to the rise of allergy, asthma, eczema and hayfever cases. Among the most discussed is the hygiene hypothesis, which attributes the rise of EoE to modern cleanliness resulting in fewer childhood infections to train the immune system and therefore making it more susceptible to going awry.
Prolonged damage to the sensitive cells lining the oesophagus from modern diets and common chemicals such as pesticides and detergents have also been discussed as a plausible explanation... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Lisa Thornton was heavily pregnant and in her early 30s when she noticed the feeling of a blockage in her oesophagus, the muscular food pipe that connects the mouth to the stomach. “At the time, I just thought it was just the pregnancy,” says Thornton, now 50, who lives in the New Forest in Hampshire. “I thought it was everything pushing up. But a few years later, things started to get worse.”
During a Sunday roast with her family, a chunk of broccoli suddenly lodged in her throat, causing spasms that persisted for hours. Any attempts to wash it down with water failed as the fluid simply came straight back up. Thornton drove to a nearby drop-in centre, where doctors tried, without success, to free the blockage with muscle relaxants.
After nearly 20 hours, she ended up in A&E. “I was put on a drip and the doctors started to talk about an operation to stretch my oesophagus to release the obstruction,” she remembers. “As a last-ditch attempt, a young doctor gave me morphine [which has a muscle relaxant effect as well as being a painkiller]. I woke up to find that, after 36 hours, the lump had finally cleared. It had been a violent, shocking experience and no one seemed to know why or how.”
But this was only the beginning. It would take another decade, and more incidents, before Thornton finally received a diagnosis: a little-known condition called eosinophilic oesophagitis (EoE), or asthma of the oesophagus.
[...] One 2022 study in Sweden even suggested that it could affect more than one in 1,000 individuals – twice as many. “That’s the highest current estimate, but it fits entirely with what we see in daily practice,” says Attwood. “More and more patients are coming through needing assessments for this swallowing difficulty and we know we’re diagnosing it more frequently.”
So what is going on? Hannah Hunter, an allergy dietitian at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, has been seeing patients with EoE for the past decade and points to various theories – ones that have also been linked to the rise of allergy, asthma, eczema and hayfever cases. Among the most discussed is the hygiene hypothesis, which attributes the rise of EoE to modern cleanliness resulting in fewer childhood infections to train the immune system and therefore making it more susceptible to going awry.
Prolonged damage to the sensitive cells lining the oesophagus from modern diets and common chemicals such as pesticides and detergents have also been discussed as a plausible explanation... (MORE - missing details)