Symptoms of Cardiac Spasm

There are many patients with cardia inflammation in our lives. These patients will feel stomach discomfort when they are sick, and they often vomit. Therefore, when cardia inflammation occurs, it is likely to cause cardia spasm. At this time, the patient will feel like there is something in the entire esophagus, and it feels like it can't go up or down. So what are the clinical manifestations of cardia spasm?

Clinical symptoms

(I) Dysphagia. Painless dysphagia is the most common symptom of this disease, accounting for more than 80% to 95%. The onset is usually slow, but it can also be rapid. It may be mild at first, with only a feeling of fullness after a meal. Dysphagia is often intermittent and is often triggered by mood swings, anger, anxiety, fear, or eating irritating foods such as cold and spicy foods. Dysphagia is sometimes present and sometimes mild, sometimes severe, and becomes persistent in the later stages. A small number of patients have more difficulty swallowing liquids than solid foods. Some people use this sign to distinguish dysphagia caused by other organic esophageal stenosis, but most patients have more difficulty swallowing solids than liquids, or have equal difficulty swallowing solid and liquid foods.

(ii) Pain accounts for about 40% to 90% of the cases. The nature of the pain varies. It can be dull pain, burning pain, stabbing pain, cutting pain or cone pain. The pain is mostly located behind the sternum and in the upper abdomen; it can also be located on the right side of the chest and back. The pain sometimes resembles angina pectoris and can even be relieved by taking nitroglycerin tablets under the tongue. The mechanism of pain may be caused by strong contraction of esophageal smooth muscle or food retention esophagitis. As the difficulty in swallowing gradually worsens, the pain can be gradually relieved by further expansion of the esophagus above the obstruction.

(III) The incidence of food reflux can reach 90%. With the increase of dysphagia, the esophagus expands further, and a considerable amount of contents can be retained in the esophagus for several hours or days. When the body position changes, it refluxes out. The contents refluxed from the esophagus do not have the characteristics of gastric vomiting because they have not entered the stomach cavity. However, they may be mixed with a large amount of mucus and saliva. When complicated with esophagitis and esophageal ulcer, the refluxed matter may contain blood.

(IV) Weight loss Weight loss is related to dysphagia, which affects food intake. Although patients with dysphagia often choose to eat slowly, eat more soup during or after eating to wash down the food, or straighten the chest and back after eating, take a deep breath or hold the breath to assist the swallowing action so that the food enters the stomach and ensures the nutritional intake, patients with a long course of disease may still lose weight and have symptoms such as malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, and cachexia is rare.

(V) Bleeding and anemia Patients often have anemia and occasionally bleeding caused by esophagitis

(VI) Other symptoms: Due to the increased tension of the lower esophageal sphincter, patients rarely experience hiccups, which is an important feature of this disease. In late cases, the extremely dilated esophagus can compress the organs in the chest cavity, causing dry cough, shortness of breath, cyanosis, hoarseness, etc.

Treatment generally uses drugs that reduce vagus nerve excitement, such as atropine, belladonna, papaverine, or ergotamine (Ergonovine) and Tosilong (Tosilong) to reduce the tension of the lower esophageal sphincter to relieve pain and dysphagia, but drug treatment is not effective. Currently mechanical dilation or surgical methods are used. Mechanical dilation can achieve good results for cases with less severe lesions if the force is applied properly and the pressure is appropriate. However, repeated treatments are required to maintain the therapeutic effect.