Step-up diet: Less-intensive way to ID eosinophilic esophagitis food triggers?

PHILADELPHIA – While traditional elimination diets for eosinophilic esophagitis are highly restrictive and endoscopically intensive, a new “step-up” approach may offer a superior empiric scheme for identifying food triggers, according to Stuart J. Spechler, MD.

The recently described step-up approach may be preferable to the standard empiric six-food elimination diet, which has a 72% success rate but is challenging to implement, according to Dr. Spechler, chief of the division of gastroenterology, Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas.

^{Andrew D. Bowser/MDedge News}

Dr. Stuart J. Spechler

“That’s an extremely demanding, time-consuming, inconvenient, and expensive thing to do. It requires at least seven endoscopies, probably more, performed over a period of 42 weeks,” Dr. Spechler said here at Digestive Diseases: New Advances, jointly provided by Rutgers and Global Academy for Medical Education.