• Question: why do we get heart burn!!!!!!!!

    Asked by elliepearce2011 to Susana, Ed, Dave on 14 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      Heart burn is what happens when we make too much stomach acid, and it gets into our oesophagus (food pipe or gullet). The stomach acid doesn’t cause us any problems in our stomach, as our stomach has evolved a special acid resistant lining, but our oesophagus doesn’t have this lining, and the stomach acid burns the oesophagus, which is why it hurts so much!

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      Your stomach is filled with acid fluids to help you digest your food, and if these happen to go back up your esophagus you get heartburn. I know eating too much and an unhealthy diet does not help, but other things can cause it like a stressful life-style. I reckon heartbrun is rather common but if you are worried about it, or it happens too often, you should ask your GP to give you some advise on how to treat it.

    • Photo: Ed Lowe

      Ed Lowe answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      As both Dave and Susana have mentioned, heartburn is caused by stomach acid winding up in the wrong place and causing acid burns to sensitive areas of your gullet, the most common form being Gastroesophageal reflux disease
      One of the ways of treating this is using proton pump inhibitors and you might also be interested to know (since this is this is the crystallography zone) that the way these drugs work has been studied by crystallography. The only studies I’m aware of used electron diffraction rather than X-rays. It was published in the journal Nature and you can see the structure here:
      http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore/explore.do?structureId=2YN9

Comments