If you keep chalky heartburn tablets in your pocket or by your bedside, you’re pretty typical. More than 20 percent of Americans suffer every week from a chronic condition that allows food or liquid to bubble up from their stomach into their esophagus. Many severely limit what they eat and when they eat it, and some pop prescription drugs—about 10 billion dollars worth every year, nationally. But now there’s a new way to control this disease.
Patients may call it heartburn, or acid reflux. Their doctors call it gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD.
Harpist Ralph Thomas, from Arlington, started having GERD symptoms, including chest pain and breathing trouble, about five years ago. He even started sleeping sitting up so he wouldn’t trigger a GERD attack at night, after a late supper. Musicians generally don’t eat much before a concert.
“And after a performance because of all the excitement, you’re starving and so you frequently eat late, and that started to get to me. So I went to my doctor and he put me on Nexium,” Thomas said.
Problem was, Thomas needed so many of those purple pills you see on TV that his doctor warned him that he was taking too many. So they began discussing the next step--surgery. The major operation for GERD sufferers is called fundoplication, which involves wrapping the upper curve of the stomach around the esophagus.
“That looked very invasive to me,” Thomas said.
Then a specialist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Ted Trus, showed him a small bracelet of magnetic beads, which he likes to roll around in his hand.
“So I’m holding a new device called a LINX device which is an esophageal sphincter augmentation device,” Trus said.
In laymen’s terms, the beads cinch the lower esophagus like a little elastic belt, allowing food to pass down to the stomach, but not come back up. A surgeon implants it fairly easily—at least, that’s how it worked for Ralph Thomas.
“By two-thirty in the afternoon I was dismissed to go home; I had a cheeseburger on the way home with no fear of any pain and since then it’s just been like twenty years ago. I can eat anything at any time, which is just what the LINX webpage says. It’s true,” Thomas said.
Okay, so he sounds a little like a pitch man for LINX, but he isn’t. He’s just happy to be able to accept invitations again, eat spicy food, grab dinner after a concert, and sleep lying down.
But of course, wrapping magnets around your esophagus may not be risk-free. The FDA gave its approval in 2012, before the device hit the market, and while the 44 patients in clinical studies showed good results, Dr. Ted Trus admits that all new procedures carry some risk. But then, he adds, so does long-term use of prescription drugs.
“We don’t have ten-year data on this so I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in ten years,” Trus said.
Trus says other devices implanted into the digestive tract have sometimes slipped or eroded, but he thinks the magnetic beads are much more likely to stay in place. He also says it’s important to choose patients carefully. The device is not intended for people who can treat the disease just as easily with medications, or for those who need more serious surgery.
