Gastritis Support Group

Gastritis is a medical term for inflammation of the lining of the stomach. It means that white blood cells move into the wall of the stomach as a response to some type of injury. Gastritis has many underlying causes, from infection with the bacterium H. pylori, bile reflux, or excessive consumption of alcohol or certain foods or drugs like aspirin.

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luckymamaof3 05/04/2015

Okay so I decided to taper of my prilosec and just do zantac. To be honest I felt like prilosec never really helped. The first two weeks I went from 40mg to 20mg a day and had a little more heartburn and then it eventually subsided. Then I went to every other day and had a little acid rebound and then started to feel pretty good. I was replacing my PPi for zantac this entire time. Now this past week I've just started every three days and I'm in full (what im assuming) acid rebound. I had some stomach cramps yesterday, felt nauseated after a smoothie that never gave me problems before and severe heartburn and regurgitation, especially at night. My throat is sore and my voice is sometimes horse in the mornings.

Here's the thing, when I had my endoscope 2 months ago they thought I had gastritis or an ulcer. But nothing was found and everything appeared normal. Even my biopsy showed no inflammation, which means no gasttitis. i questioned my doctors office as to if everything appears normal then why do I feel so horrible, their reply is you have stress induced GERD and its a good thing we caught it in time before there is any damage done. So basically my stomach was producing too much acid (according to them). Going into all this I had nausea and loss of appitite and then about two days after the antibiotics my acid reflux started.

I guess my question is this, because I have never felt 100% (there has always been some type of symptom everyday) on the prilosec, should I just change to a different PPi? Or maybe my new symptoms of the heartburn are actually from taking PPis? I feel like because i had no damage done in my stomach why should I put my body through the PPI side effects (which I had plenty on prilosec). Also I'm scared if I continue to get off the PPi could I actually cause damage?

Sorry for the ramble, I just feel a little lost and I feel like if I Call my GI's office they will just say to get back on a PPI. Maybe only in a perfect world can I have no heartburn, eat spicey food again and sleep with only one pillow!!!!

guskoburido 05/04/2015

speaking from my own experience i think your heartburn/gerd like mine is from the PPI. PPi is known to wipe out all the acid in the stomach, when you do that a lot of stuff in your body stops doing its job one of them is the muscle which keeps your acid in your stomach and not in the esophagus, this muscle gets really strong when it senses acid coming up (when you sleep) and relaxes when theres no acid. So if you are in many months/years with nearly 0 acid, that muscle forgets/get weaker whatever way you look at it it doesnt work properly now because of the PPI and now you get heartburn/acid rebound + the fact that your cells produce more acid = super heartburn. It burned my throat when i quit the ppi cold turkey, it should be done imo super slowly so the muscle gets stronger little by little. My voice/throat was like yours for a while after a few months with no PPI no more heartburn, i could eat then lay down flat, etc.

This is from my experience and friend who went through the same thing, he used PPI for a week he had heartburn for months but now he eats pork and tons of non-GERD stuff just fine(he never had gastritis though).

Sara59 05/04/2015

This is what I'd do. If the Prilosec kept me from having stomach cramps and burning throat on the every other day regimen, then I'd stick with that for a while longer before decreasing again. I'm no doc, but this is something people are advised to do when weaning off meds.

guskoburido 05/04/2015

if you feel theres no damage to your stomach then you dont need PPIs...imo..the problem is the damage being done to your esophagus...and you may need a PPI again because this is just as serious. It's your call, I went through hell to stop the damage from the PPI in my stomach and some people sleep sitting up for it (I didn't) and my throat killed me every day maybe I should've continued the PPI back then.

I felt no damage done to my stomach from quitting PPIs either but if you decide to go back to PPI, taper super slowly this time. It's hard to say what to do in your case assuming you don't have more acid or gastritis anymore, just a weak LES from PPIs.

We don't know what's really going on so talk to your doctor at least once about this.

guskoburido 05/04/2015

*stop the damage from the PPI to my esophagus.

luckymamaof3 05/04/2015

Thanks for the encouragement! Pretty ironic that my PPI has created my heartburn. I'm going to give this two more weeks and see how I'm doing. When I was doing every other day I was feeling so great! I was even able to have coffee with no issues! Now I feel crappy again. I just wish my doctor would have prescribed Zantac instead of prilosec, especially since my scope was normal.

shihonage 05/05/2015

It's hard to understand from your description what exactly you were doing, but it sounds like you were trying to taper off a PPI and then switch to Zantac.

That's not how it's done. Getting off any of these meds is extremely hard. The goal is to switch from one to equipotent dose of another, decisively.

Andy1986 05/05/2015

Were you on PPIs for your endoscopy? If so, its no surprise there was no inflammation, doesn't mean your stomach isn't inflamed now coming off them.

For some people even though there are no signs of damage, they get symptoms from acid irritating the stomach. If PPIs give you symptom relief then I would stick with them for a while.

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