Does LPR ever go away

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Rosie Rose

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With medication and diet changes, does LPR usually get better, or does one have to stay on medication forever?
 
The problem with questions like this is generally speaking:

The people who are really suffering from LPR symptoms are the ones, like you and me, who go on these pages. We are newly diagnosed, scared, having a flair up and new to all of this. Wondering if we will have a normal life.

The ones who got better never go back on these pages once they feel good again. They just want to put it all behind them and forget it ever happened.

And... the ones who have really bad chronic health problems, rather than mild LPR, will often be regularly using the board. It's hard to say, but probably unlikely that you or I are in that boat, I'm guessing. Anyway, it came on me suddenly and I'm a 29 year old guy. I just got a severe URI and it came on with that. Lovely. What is your story?
 
You got it right. Came on quickly with me. ENT probe showed a very inflamed throat; barium swallow was normal. On Prilosec for past 2 weeks and using "Slippery Elm" lozenges, especially at night; also trying digestive enzymes with meals; definitite improvement, but still have the feeling of phlegm stuck in the throat a good deal of the time. Wondering if "Nexium" might be more effective. Really hate the thought of having to be on medication forever as these drugs affect absorption of calcium. Hoping that at some point, watching my diet will be sufficient.
 
I've noticed improvement this week, thank goodness too! At first I thought I was imagining it, but then I did the same activities that I did a week before and realized that a week before, I could barely do the things I'm doing now, and I was not thinking about anything about how bad I felt.
I am on two somac a day, and just watching what I eat really carefully. I'm even afraid of tomatoes. I think though, based on what I've been reading by the real experts like Dr. Jamie Koufman in New York (who invented the term LPR, I bet she's expensive), that this is a really complicated disease. Part of it is the damage to the throat, and part of it is possibly nerve damage she said, and a general wear down of the cellls in the larynx that in most people can actually withstand or neutralize some of the acid. I'm not a doctor though, but what I'm saying is that I really hope that maybe our immune systems and cells just get worn down and that contributes to this disease. If you get acid out of their and let it all repair for a long time, and reduce acid in general, then probably (maybe?) you can go off the PPIs in the future and it will be fine. I think I've heard of quite a few people doing that and getting away with it. Let's hope we will be so lucky! I hope we both will be just looking back on this one day and laughing, and maybe we'll even have better eating habits and such because of it!
 
I don't think LPR ever actually goes away. It is a weak esophageal sphincter that allows the acid to come up. That said, I know that for me it appears to run in cycles. With diet, lifestyle modifications and medical treatment, I'll have my symptoms under control for awhile. Then something will cause my to "flare" and it will take me months to get it back under control again.

Examples of things that make it worse for me are things like asthma, allergies and other illnesses. When I cough a lot, it squeezes the stomach, making the reflux worse. Once my throat and lungs are inflamed from the acid irritation it takes a long time to get it calmed back down again.

I do know that when things are flared, I'm miserable. I do have perioRAB of time where the symptoms are managed though and I really appreciate those.

I do know, however, that in my case the underlying cause isn't gone. I've had acid testing when I'm feeling fine and had it come back reading as severe. I take that as a sign that I'm just managing the symptoms better at times than others. The tough thing though is that I can't always find anything I'm doing different at those times.
 
Atleast you got it at 29 and not 19 like me. I wish I could have had ten more years symptom free lol.
 
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