Preoperative patient factors and anatomy do not predict who will develop reflux after per oral endoscopic myotomy

Per oral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) has been shown to be an efficacious and safe therapy for the treatment of achalasia. Compared to laparoscopic Heller myotomy however, no antireflux procedure is routinely combined with POEM and therefore the development of symptomatic or silent reflux is of concern. This study was designed to determine if various patient factors and anatomy would predict the development of gastroesophageal reflux disease post-operatively.

This was a retrospective cohort study of all patients who underwent a POEM at a single institution by a single surgeon over an eight-year period (2014-2022). It has been our practice to obtain a postoperative ambulatory pH test on all patients 6 months after POEM off all acid reducing medications. Patients without a postoperative ambulatory esophageal pH monitoring test were excluded. Age, sex, obesity (BMI > 30), achalasia type, presence of a hiatal hernia, history of prior endoscopic achalasia treatments or myotomy were analyzed using univariate analysis as predictive factors for the development of postoperative GERD (DeMeester score > 14.7 on ambulatory pH monitoring).

There were 179 total patients included in the study with 42 patients (23.5%) having undergone postoperative ambulatory pH testing. The majority of patients (137 or 76.5%) were lost to follow up and did not undergo ambulatory pH testing. Twenty-three out of those 42 patients (55%) had evidence of GERD on ambulatory pH testing. Multiple preoperative patient characteristics including demographics, manometric results, EGD findings, and history of prior achalasia interventions did not correlate with the development of post-operative GERD.

Despite the high rate of reflux after POEM, there does not appear to be any reliable preoperative indicators of which patients have a higher risk of developing post-operative GERD after POEM.