Dysphagia – Diagnosis

Transcript

How is dysphasia diagnosed? In order to determine the cause of your swallowing problem, your doctor will likely perform a physical examination and may use a variety of different tests. Tests may include an x-ray with contrast material that you swallow, that they can take a video and watch the food travel from the mouth all the way down into the stomach. This provides an image of the food and liquids as they pass all the way through, looking for areas of constriction or difficulty passing. This is called the modified barium swallow or videosophagram. Looking at your esophagus is very important. And what we do is use a small thin tube that goes through the nose and allows us to look at your throat to see your esophagus. We also feed people if they’re having trouble swallowing, while watching with a camera called the FEES examination, we can feed you and see where the food and liquid goes. There are tests that measure pressures in the throat and the esophagus called manometry, which is a thin tube inserted from the nose into the esophagus. And this measures the pressure and contractions of the esophagus. Images, scans such as CAT scan or MRI. And also we can do acid testing of the throat to measure if there’s acid contributing to your swallowing issue.