Eosinophilic Esophagitis

A healthcare provider will do a physical examination and ask about your symptoms. Questions may include:

• Your eating habits: People with this condition often try to manage their symptoms by chewing their food into mush so they can swallow it, avoiding foods they can’t easily swallow or drinking lots of fluids so they can swallow food.
• Your medical history: Often, people with eosinophilic esophagitis have asthma, food allergies, seasonal allergies, eczema or atopic dermatitis.
• Your family’s medical history: Risk of eosinophilic esophagitis is higher if a biological family member also has it. You’re more likely to have the condition if a sibling or parent has it, but overall rates are still low. It’s unclear if it has to do with genetics or if it’s due to environmental factors.

If a provider thinks you may have eosinophilic esophagitis, they’ll refer you to a gastroenterologist, who can do the following procedures:

• Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD): During an EGD test, your gastroenterologist uses an endoscope to look at the inside of your esophagus. Endoscopes are long flexible tubes with small lighted cameras at one end.
• Biopsy: During your EGD, your gastroenterologist may take tiny samples of your esophagus tissue. A pathologist will examine the samples under a microscope to see if there are unusually large numbers of eosinophils in the tissue.