Fasting Gastric Acidity Evidential Effect on Esophageal Mucosal Damage

Abstract

Gastric substances that potentially increase the esophageal mucosal damage are: gastric acid, pepsin, bile salts, and pancreatic enzymes. From all of these substances, the highest potential for reflux damage is gastric acid. Although the main cause of clinical symptoms of GERD is acid reflux, it has been known that there are subgroups with typical reflux symptoms that do not provide sufficient response or not responsive to PPI treatment. Despite the improvement of esophagitis, there is no clinical improvements in reflux symptoms of 30% respondents. Therefore, this study was designed to determine fasting gastric acidity with endoscopic findings in patients with GERD. A comparative-analysis study, which determine the fasting gastric acidity from endoscopic findings in patients with GERD. Samples recruited using consecutives sampling technique and divided into groups of esophagitis and non-esophagitis reflux. A total of 40 samples involved in this study. The Mann-Whitney test, was used for analyzing the difference between fasting gastric acidity from endoscopic findings of esophagitis lesions in patient with GERD. The median value for fasting gastric acidity in the esophagitis reflux group was 1.88 (0.82-4.84), whereas the median value for fasting gastric acidity in the non-esophagitis reflux group was 2.49 (0.68-5.97). The Mann-Whitney test result was p=0.298 (p>0.05). This study shows that there is no significant difference of fasting gastric acidity from endoscopic findings between esophagitis and non esophagitis reflux groups in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). This study shows that esophagitis lesions are not affected by gastric acidity.