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Using Over-the-Counter Medicines for Heartburn When is Heartburn Just Heartburn? Night Pains: Is Heartburn Keeping You Up? Medication Strategies for Heartburn

Heartburn

Is Your Heartburn Medicine Working?

Summary & Participants

How do you know which heartburn medicine will bring you the best relief? Researchers studying acid reflux can tell us how they measure relief. But what does that mean for the millions of people who suffer occasional heartburn? Listen to gastroenterologists describe what they know about quelling the discomfort of heartburn.

Medically Reviewed On: July 01, 2008

Webcast Transcript

HASHEM B. EL-SERAG, MD, MPH: The outcome measures are geared towards: how can we measure and quantify and qualify the symptom of heartburn itself? This is problematic, but this has progressed a long way throughout the past 20 years from just asking them, "Do you feel well or not," to questionnaires that have certain grades to it. So those are the so-called validated questionnaires that measure the symptoms of heartburn.

ANNOUNCER: Armed with these tools, researchers in the 1990s started conducting well-designed, scientific studies of over-the-counter heartburn medications.

In an effort to develop treatment recommendations, the American Gastroenterological Association recently convened a panel of experts, to review those studies.

One of those studies, which is un-published, divided 16-hundred heartburn sufferers into four groups.

One group tried antacids. One tried H2 blockers. A third group tried a tablet that combined an H2 blocker with an antacid. The fourth group was given an inactive substance, a placebo.

HASHEM B. EL-SERAG, MD, MPH: The key results were that the tablet that contains the combination of an antacid with an H-2 blocker has combined the advantages of an antacid with the advantages of an H-2 blocker, and therefore almost predictably it performed better than an antacid alone, and better than an H-2 blocker alone, and definitely better than placebos.

ANNOUNCER: Based on this research and other studies, the panel of experts convened by the American Gastroenterological Association concluded that over-the-counter medications can be safe and effective for treating episodic heartburn for periods not exceeding four weeks.

HASHEM B. EL-SERAG, MD, MPH: Our consensus regarding the use of OTC in the treatment of heartburn were that OTC are effective or have been shown to be effective in the prevention of heartburn and acid regurgitation symptoms. They have also been effective in reducing the severity of heartburn symptoms. And they have been effective in relieving meal-induced heartburn symptoms.

ANNOUNCER: Most doctors agree, as long as there are no warning signs of a more serious condition.

STEVEN PEIKIN, MD: I think it is fine to self-medicate and take some of the products that are widely available in the supermarkets and the drugstores, for most people that's fine. I think though that if you find that these medications aren't totally alleviating your symptoms or that you have to take them every day, all the time. If you have any symptoms of trouble swallowing or burning when the food goes down, then these are situations where you really should see a doctor.

ANNOUNCER: But for most sufferers of heartburn, that's not necessary. Instead, research and clinical experience show an over-the-counter product may be all that's needed for safe and effective relief.

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