Health Headlines: New ways to diagnose gastrointestinal disorders

BALTIMORE, Md. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Sixty to 70 million Americans suffer from gastrointestinal disorders, and undergo endoscopies and colonoscopies, which show structural problems in the digestive tract. But taking it a step beyond, a new breath and motility center can diagnose an assortment of GI problems, based on motility, or how food is actually moving through your system.

Forty percent of all Americans suffer from gastrointestinal diseases, such as nausea, fecal incontinence, and IBS. Lateara White knows the feeling — she spent a whole year throwing up every single night.

Lateara recalls, “I would vomit at least five times out the week, at night. I would always get it at night.”

That’s when she turned to a new breath and motility center at Mercy Medical Center. In this digestive clinic, patients breathe into a bag and those breath gasses are then tested for food intolerance and malabsorption, which means it analyzes how food is moving through the digestive system.

“People with motility problems, like gastroparesis, where the stomach is not, you know, doing that process efficiently, the food will actually sit in the stomach for hours or even days at a time,” explains Bryan Curtin, MD at Mercy Medical Center.

But Lateara was diagnosed with gastroparesis, leaving her feeling like she’d just eaten when she hadn’t.

“Even though I’m hungry, I still felt full. I couldn’t eat a whole meal,” she says.

Finally, the breath’s concentration of hydrogen and methane gas provide insight into any common sugar intolerance.

Dr. Curtain adds, “Then I have a dietician that works directly with me, and a lot of times, the first step is to, kind of, have somebody, you know, objectively look at your diet and, sort of, identify potential trouble spots.”

Lateara did that, and finally found the relief she’d been looking for, for more than a year. If you have unexplained chronic GI symptoms, such as constipation, nausea, diarrhea, and heartburn, it may be time to consider a motility disorder.

Contributors to this news report include: Donna Parker, Producer; Kirk Manson, Videographer; Matt Goldschmidt, Editor.

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