The Truth About Barrett’s

I want to make an important point about your case, which is the fact that you have Barrett’s esophagus. An important question is, “Where does Barrett’s esophagus come from?” It actually is due to reflux. When reflux causes tissue erosion, the normal tissue is replaced by other types of tissue. This other type tissue is a more specialized tissue, and that’s felt to be the precancerous tissue that develops called Barrett’s.

The great thing we realized when we published the 10 year data about the Stretta procedure is that by reducing your reflux we know that about 85% of the time, the Barrett’s will spontaneously regress or disappear.

When we achieve the control of your reflux and the Barrett’s regresses, you will not need the follow ups. You will not need to have to continue to look at this endoscopically. We will see over time, usually it’s going to happen within the first few years.

I would not be surprised if a couple of years from now, we see this tissue has just gone ahead and disappeared. How is this possible? The reason is that your lining of your gut sloughs away and is replaced by new lining every three to five days. By controlling the reflux we get rid of the inflammation at the basal lamina layer of cells, where the tissue develops and moves up from the bottom. If the Stretta procedure works and you’re not refluxing anymore, there’s no more inflammation in what we call the basal lamina, where there are stem cells. Thus if the stem cells are not inflamed any longer, they grow normal tissue as opposed to Barrett’s tissue or cancer tissue. That is why the abnormal tissue disappears spontaneously after a Stretta procedure.