Ross Hart (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I would like to bring to the attention of the House a little-known disease afflicting some people in our communities. This condition is gastroparesis.

One of my constituents, Denis Turner, has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of this disease. His daughter Jacinta was working as a registered nurse when she thought she had come down with a stomach bug that stumped her doctors. Jacinta now relies on a liquid diet to receive any sustenance.

There are an estimated 125,000 gastroparesis sufferers in Australia, the majority of whom have no underlying cause for the disease. There are a small percentage of patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes who experience chronic gastroparesis.

There is no cure for gastroparesis. The current goals of treatment are to relieve symptoms. Treatment focuses on dietary modifications; control of blood glucose in patients with diabetes; and the use of prokinetic and antiemetic agents, either alone or in combination. Most of these treatments are based upon clinical experience as experimental evidence to support these interventions is lacking.

Last year, the family of Tasmanian Emily Pickett raised enough money for the Rotary Club of Devonport's application for a grant for gastroparesis research to be accepted by the Australian Rotary Health research foundation. Only very recently the scholarship was taken up by a PhD candidate at the university of Western Sydney school of medicine to look at how dietary modification could possibly alleviate the symptoms of gastroparesis. I welcome this good news, as it gives hope to the thousands of sufferers in Australia.