Yesterday was a good day for esophageal research and topics.  I attended a session on GERD pharmacotherapy and GERD diagnosis, and the poster session.  The video blog is (ahem) still uploading…I’ll get that link up here shortly.

The very brief outcomes were:

• Although some of the new pharmacologic treatments studies, they have not been further pursued in the drug development pipeline
• Many patients stay ON PPI therapy despite having negative Bravo pH or pH-impedance studies. (This is my argument for NOT doing study off therapy…the patients often remain on therapy even with a negative test, so there was little reason to actually do the test this way)
• Subsquamous intestinal metaplasia (SSIM; aka buried glands) exist in the native state in Barrett’s esophagus pts in under the native squamous lining.  This is important since we often consider SSIM a result of ablation, but this gives further evidence that it already exists.