What Actually Is Gastroparesis? (Signs + Symptoms)

If you’ve been diagnosed with gastroparesis or you think that you may be suffering from it, it helps to know a little bit about what the condition actually is.

Put simply, gastroparesis is partial paralysis of the stomach. It’s actually in the name – gastro (stomach) and paresis, or partial weakness or paralysis. Of course, when we think about paralysis, we think about something being unable to move at all, and it turns out that gastroparesis has a little bit more to it than that.

Essentially, muscles in your stomach are not moving food as they should, and food ends up sitting in your stomach longer than normal.

Gastroparesis And Digestion

In a nutshell, gastroparesis simply means that your stomach is not emptying as effectively as it should be. Your gastric emptying – or the rate in which food leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine, is delayed. We’ll talk more about the symptoms this causes a little later, but it helps to know a little bit about how digestion works.

We all know that when you eat and swallow food, it ends up in the stomach – but this is only one of the first parts of digestion.

While it’s in the stomach, it’s supposed to be broken down. The stomach produces enzymes and stomach acid, while also mixing and churning the food to help break it down into smaller pieces, sort of pre-digesting it.

Then, at the base of the stomach, you have something called a pyloric sphincter. This is supposed to relax to allow the pre-digested food to pass into the small intestine, where the rest of the digestion process begins.

So, food enters the stomach, it gets broken down, pyloric sphincter relaxes, food enters the small intestine.

Gastroparesis, or delayed stomach emptying, happens when the muscles in your stomach don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

Normally, your stomach gently squeezes and pushes food into your small intestine after you eat. But with gastroparesis, those muscle movements are too slow or not strong enough. It’s not usually because something is blocking the exit (like the pyloric sphincter), but because the muscles aren’t getting the right signals from your nerves – especially the vagus nerve, which helps control digestion.

When that communication breaks down, food can sit in your stomach much longer than it should. So what causes this to happen in the first place?

While gastroparesis has many different causes, it often comes down to damage to the body’s vagus nerve.

Your vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body, and controls a lot of core bodily functions, digestion being one of them. It runs from the brainstem to the abdomen, and one of its jobs is to regulate the opening and closing of the pyloric sphincter, making sure that food passes from the stomach to the small intestine at the right time. This is important to know – it’s not damage to your pyloric sphincter or the stomach itself that causes gastroparesis – it’s damage to the nerve that’s not allowing the muscles in your stomach to work properly.

To reiterate again, gastroparesis is a partially paralyzed stomach, resulting in delayed gastric emptying, typically but not always caused by damage to the vagus nerve.

Symptoms Of Gastroparesis

So, now that we know what’s actually happening in our bodies when we have gastroparesis, what are the symptoms?

They can vary from person to person, and there are no hard rules. Someone may have no symptoms at all, or ALL of the symptoms at different points. Generally speaking however, gastroparesis patients experience things like nausea, often after eating. Sometimes, if food is unable to move through, this may also result in vomiting – sometimes completely undigested food, and sometimes many hours after it’s been eaten. If you are regularly vomiting undigested food, this may be a good indication of gastroparesis.

Gastroparesis sufferers also frequently feel full, even after eating just a few bites of food. This feeling of fullness can last for many hours after eating, and gastroparesis patients may not get hungry as quickly because of this. In fact, lack of an appetite, even if it’s been a while since you’ve eaten last, is also a good indicator that you may have gastroparesis.

The new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are effective at weight loss partially because they make people feel full longer.

This feeling of fullness often leads to things like bloating or stomach pain. I personally feel fortunate I never really experience this one – I’m more of a chronic nausea person myself, but for some people bloating and stomach pain is their ONLY symptom.

Because food actually does sit in the stomach for a long period of time, this can cause food to ferment in the stomach, leading to bacteria growth. It can also lead to acid reflux or heartburn, as the stomach produces more acid to try and break down the food that’s sitting there. Abdominal distension – or your stomach enlarging due to food being stuck in there, also makes it easier for stomach acid to escape into your esophagus.

Finally, we have the effects of not being able to eat as much food as you should be. This can manifest itself in lots of different ways, ranging from weight loss, to changes in blood sugar, dehydration, and even life-threatening malnutrition.

I must reiterate again that it’s possible to have all of these symptoms, or none of them, and still have gastroparesis. Additionally, there are other conditions, like functional dyspepsia, gastritis, cyclical vomiting syndrome or even gallbladder issues that can mimic gastroparesis. The best way to confirm a diagnosis is to undergo a gastric emptying study, which I’ll cover in another article.

Next Steps

If you have been diagnosed and you want to know what next steps I recommend to get back on the right track – while still enjoying life and minimizing the impact of the disease right now, be sure to grab my gastroparesis cheat sheet at GastroparesisTogether.com/cheatsheet. It has five of my greatest tips to manage gastroparesis and get you down a better path – maybe not to complete recovery, but certainly to a better life.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out other articles on this site to learn more about managing this terrible condition!