Word: esophagus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whatever you do, don't make yourself throw up. "Vomiting on an empty stomach--which is usually the case with a hangover--can create potentially dangerous tears in the esophagus," says Dr. Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher at Brown University. He recommends Pepto-Bismol if you're feeling nauseated...
...prone to lower-bowel problems like diarrhea, probably because blood rushes from the intestine to hardworking leg muscles. Weight lifters and cyclists, for their part, tend to suffer from heartburn. Why? Because tensing abdominal muscles or hunching over the handlebars can cause stomach acid to rise into the esophagus...
...cigar magazines, cigar dinners and cigar charity auctions to remind you. What they don't emphasize--but what doctors have known for a while--is that smoking cigars on a regular basis significantly increases your risk of developing emphysema as well as cancers of the lung, lip, throat and esophagus. Last week the New England Journal of Medicine added to that grim list, reporting that cigar smoking also boosts your risk of heart disease...
...nearly 30 years. No big deal, though--or so I thought until I read a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of weeks ago. Turns out that this repeated acid bath can alter esophageal cells, creating a condition known as Barrett's esophagus. Once that happens, the cells can become precancerous, then malignant. For someone like me, with almost daily heartburn, the overall risk of esophageal cancer--one of the nastiest cancers--is a horrifying 43 times greater than average...
...found myself last week in the examining room of Dr. Robert Meirowitz. Like many of his fellow gastroenterologists, Meirowitz has seen an upswing in patients since the journal article came out. Fortunately, he explains, GERD is usually not serious. Only about 5% of sufferers get Barrett's esophagus, and only 5% of those go on to develop cancer. However, as Dr. Joel Richter, head of gastroenterology at the Cleveland Clinic, points out, "The only way to be sure you don't have these conditions is to have an endoscopy...