However, the relationship between stress and heartburn is a tricky one; just as one man's stress is another's adrenalin rush, stress may sock in the gut somebut not allpeople who have GERD.
And although stress may exacerbate GERD symptoms, it's unlikely to be the underlying cause of your chronic heartburn. In the past, stress was thought to be the culprit in a variety of gastrointestinal problems, including ulcers and inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease. Now it's known that bacterial infections (in the case of ulcers) and underlying inflammation (in bowel diseases) are to blame, not stress.
Stomach acid may rise, but not everyone feels the burn
Even if excess weight, smoking, alcohol, or other GERD-triggering factors are the underlying cause of your heartburn, stress can make you feel the symptoms of acid reflux more acutely.
"Stress can affect many gut functions, and we know that patients who are under a lot of psychological stress suffer from more severe reflux symptomswithout necessarily having more severe reflux," says Mitchell Cappell, MD, PhD, the chief of gastroenterology at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich. "We live in stressful times and heartburn is incredibly common," he says.
In surveys, the majority of people who experience acid reflux identify stress as a common trigger. The problem is that studies have failed to find a connection between the stress and the amount of stomach acid in the esophagus, which is the ultimate cause of heartburn pain. One explanation for this discrepancy is that stress may cause what's known as "hypervigilance." In other words, stressed people become more sensitive to and have a greater awareness of physical symptoms that may not bother them if they weren't stressed.
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