Implantica AG (publ.), a medtech company at the forefront of introducing advanced technology into the body, announces the independent study ‘Multicentric short term and safety study of ineffective esophageal motility (IEM) patients treated with RefluxStop device’ was recently published in Nature Scientific Reports.
This investigator-initiated independent multicenter study was conducted at the General Hospital of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and King Edward VII Hospital in London, UK, from 2021 through 2023. All 40 patients had Ineffective Esophageal Motility (IEM) preoperatively, a notoriously difficult-to-treat subgroup of GERD patients.
Three months after the RefluxStop™ procedure, symptoms completely resolved or improved in 90% of the patients, PPI consumption was reduced by 84% and Quality of Life GERD-HRQL score was reduced from 32.8 to 6.6, an improvement of 80%, with limited side effects.
Patients with ineffective esophageal motility (IEM) have a weaker transportation of food down the esophagus and, therefore, often have swallowing difficulties. These patients are usually not recommended for surgery with standard of care surgical methods because they encircle and put pressure on the food passageway causing swallowing problems to worsen. This patient group comprises about one-third of the acid reflux sufferers that have no well working treatment today.
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schoppmann of the Medical University of Vienna says, “It’s exciting to conduct the first real-world multicenter study assessing the safety and efficacy of the RefluxStop procedure. We found patients treated with RefluxStop experienced substantial improvements in quality of life and reflux symptoms with minimal safety issues despite all having ineffective esophageal motility. IEM is a well-known group of patients without any effective treatment options.” He adds, “Given RefluxStop’s great promising early results showing significant improvement in patient outcomes in GERD, we are now planning additional studies to validate our findings further and hopefully establish this as an effective treatment option to help the widely underserved GERD patient population.”
Dr. Peter Forsell, inventor of RefluxStop™ and CEO & Founder of Implantica adds, “It is exciting to see how well RefluxStop treats IEM patients with limited side effects since it does not encircle the food passageway like existing standard of care surgical treatments. Since launch several hundred patients with IEM have been operated with RefluxStop and the results have been excellent. We are very pleased to see these results published in Scientific Reports, a journal of Nature portfolio, which is a hallmark of high-quality research work, and would like to thank Prof Schoppmann and Dr. Boyle for their dedicated work. It is satisfying to see the RefluxStop procedure used for GERD patients with esophageal motility disorders given that historically these patients were largely excluded from the existing anti-reflux surgical treatments. RefluxStop™ has established itself as a great hope for these difficult-to-treat patients as well as millions of other GERD patients who would benefit from the RefluxStop procedure with its unique mechanism of action.”
