The Endoscope and Acid Reflux Disease
The flexible fiber-optic endoscope has made a huge contribution to our knowledge of medicine, and nowhere more so than for patients with GERD and acid reflux disease. It is a fully flexible tube inside of which is a bundle of glass fibers through which the operator can see very clearly what is going on inside the throat, esophagus and stomach. It also allows instruments to be passed along its length so that biopsies (pieces of tissue) can be taken at specific points in the full view of the operator, for microscopic examination.
It is passed under local anesthetic into the esophagus. It may sound horrendous to have such a procedure without a general anesthetic, but the sedative makes you so drowsy beforehand that you hardly feel the discomfort and will have very little memory of it afterwards.
Endoscopy gives its operator a magnified view of what is happening over the whole length of the esophagus, the cardia and the stomach. It is used for diagnosis, to assess the severity and the extent of the esophagitis, to help determine acid reflux causes, and to relate the site of the cardia to the level of the diaphragm. This point is seen as the Z-line, a sharp difference in appearance of the surface as the esophageal lining becomes the stomach lining.
