Mayo Clinic Minute: Treating eosinophilic esophagitis with special diet

Everyone experiences the choking feeling of food getting caught in his or her esophagus occasionally, but roughly 1 in 2,000 people experiences it constantly. For those people, it's caused by a condition called eosinophilic esophagitis, or EOE.

Doctors didn't fully identify EOE until around 2000, and didn't start regularly diagnosing it in adult patients until around 2006. Since then, EOE has become more common.

There are short-term treatments for EOE like steroid pills, but physicians at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota are researching ways to treat the condition long term with changes in diet.

In this Mayo Clinic Minute, Dr. Jeffrey Alexander, a Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist and hepatologist, explains why the fact EOE is actually an allergy condition could bring promise for better treatment. Ian Roth reports.