Two questions I would want answered before drawing anything from the gastro-oesophageal reflux data above: how were the cases selected, and what happened to the ones that dropped out.
The question in the title: Gastro-oesophageal reflux: improving or worsening? I will give what I have already checked below so nobody repeats it.
Collecting what is known about gastro-oesophageal reflux in one place, because it is currently spread across a category, two tag pages and a thread that is hard to find.
This is a summary rather than new work, and I have attributed each part to where I found it.
The arithmetic in the opening post is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
The practical version of gastro-oesophageal reflux is three sentences long. The rigorous version is three pages and reaches the same conclusion with the conditions attached.
Nothing here is medical advice and clinicians posting in this subcategory say so on their own account rather than because a rule requires it.
Having read the whole gastro-oesophageal reflux thread before replying: the question in the first post has not actually been answered yet, and three of us have answered a nearby one instead.
Adding the measurement that post #3 says would settle it.
Bariatric surgery history: altered anatomy after surgery affects absorption. That matters for oral medications and for reconstituted solutions. Discussing specific medications and doses with a clinician familiar with bariatric surgery is prudent.
I have no interest in any supplier named above.
Trying to state the gastro-oesophageal reflux position in a way that someone who disagrees would recognise as fair, because I do not think the version in this thread passes that test.
A note on how gastro-oesophageal reflux gets discussed rather than on gastro-oesophageal reflux itself: the confident posts get the replies and the careful ones get ignored, and the careful ones have been right more often.
Where two conditions pull in opposite directions, that is a clinical judgement rather than a lookup, and it is the kind of question a forum answers worst.
Asking about a population rather than about yourself is a legitimate framing and generally gets a better answer, because the general case is answerable.
Second this, and I would have said it less carefully.
Where a condition is well controlled and where it is not are different questions and the published data rarely distinguishes them.
Post #16 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
On gastro-oesophageal reflux I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.
Narrowing post #16, because the general version has more than one answer.
The bit of gastro-oesophageal reflux that nobody enjoys is that the answer changes depending on what you are trying to decide with it. Say what the decision is and the thread will converge.
Everything in post #18 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
I have three months of notes on gastro-oesophageal reflux and the honest summary is that the trend is real and the week-to-week numbers are noise. I nearly drew the opposite conclusion from the first fortnight.
Post #19 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.
Gastrointestinal conditions interact with a mechanism that slows gastric emptying in ways that are plausible and largely unstudied.
If anyone can point at the primary source I would be grateful.
Taking post #19 at face value and following it one step further.
I would put moderate confidence on the mainstream reading of gastro-oesophageal reflux and no more. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is where the sourcing actually stops.
I had read the opposite somewhere and cannot now find where, which tells me something.
Small correction to my own earlier position on gastro-oesophageal reflux. I had the units the wrong way round, which changes the conclusion by an order of magnitude and therefore changes it entirely.
Post #22 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.
The practical value of this subcategory is helping somebody frame the question they take to an appointment, and that is worth being explicit about.
Not a strong opinion, just a consistent one.
Nobody has said the unglamorous part of gastro-oesophageal reflux yet, so: most of the variation is explained by things that are boring to write about and easy to check.
The arithmetic in post #27 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
A condition that affects nutrition or absorption changes the calculus around a treatment that reduces intake, and that interaction is mostly unstudied.
That is the shape of it. The detail is where I would expect to be corrected.
Taking gastro-oesophageal reflux seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.