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Chronic functional dyspepsia. Possible outflow obstruction.

Posted by josephkahn @josephkahn, May 8, 2017

Hi everyone,
Really happy to be joining this community!

In 2013 I started experiencing symptoms of chronic dyspepsia as well as early fullness. Constantly feel discomfort in stomach, nausea and occasional constipation. The main problem is early fullness: I feel totally sick after a couple bites or sips of anything. In the last couple years I've lost a bunch of weight.

Four different medical teams have tried to figure out what's wrong. Two CT scans, an MRI, 4 endoscopies, a colonoscopy, multiple pathology tests, a gastric emptying study, and four upper-GI series. I've not undergone any procedures or been put on medication for more than a week or two at a time.

At the moment two different medical teams are arguing about what's wrong with me. One believes based on an MRI and CT scan that there is an outflow obstruction after the second part of my duodenum, which they think is annular pancreas or some close variant. They believe that by bypassing my duodenum they will relieve me of the symptoms. The other team (looking at the same images) thinks there isn't evidence to justify an operation and thinks the problem is functional. Both teams agree that the duodenum is slightly dilated, and there is some amount of narrowing after the second phase.

I don't know what to do since we've basically exhausted all of the different imaging and scope-based tests as far as I can tell.

If anyone has suffered from these symptoms before or been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate hearing your stories.

Thank you so much,

Joseph

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mmorley | @mmorley | Mar 15 9:04am
In reply to @josephkahn "To the best of my knowledge, both of those have been ruled out. At the moment..." + (show)
@josephkahn

To the best of my knowledge, both of those have been ruled out. At the moment I'm doing little to manage my diet except eating more frequent, smaller meals (or snacking through the day). I don't have any allergies as far as we know. Have also used liquid nutritional supplements.

At this point, I've had opinions from 4 separate medical teams. Will be getting an endoscopic ultrasound to try and figure out if there really is an obstruction in the next couple months.

Any thoughts? 🙂

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I read your story with great interest and so sorry for what you are going through. Several years ago I could not eat more that a few bites of food, like you, and lost too much weight. They did several tests, including a Hyda scan ( for gallbladder) and it was negative. The pain and nausea went on for a year and then I was hospitalized. After a week there, they did another type of scan and it showed a diseased gallbladder (no stones) so they removed it and it made the symptoms disappear. I recently had an endoscopic ultrasound for upper abdomen burning (not inside the stomach itself) and only had a narrowing of the common bile duct, so it was negative.
Now diagnosed with Functional Dyspepsia and put on 25mg of Desipramine to see if it will help. I realize you posted this in 2017. How are you doing now and what did they find out?

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