Women Are Four Times More Likely To Have This Overlooked Gut Condition

You eat a normal-sized meal and feel uncomfortably full within a few bites. Or you're dealing with persistent nausea that comes and goes without a clear explanation.

It's easy to chalk these things up to stress or a sensitive stomach, but for a lot of women, there's something more specific going on.

A new review published in JAMA1 takes a close look at gastroparesis, a digestive condition that's more common than most people realize, and offers updated guidance on how to recognize it, who's most at risk, and what actually helps.

About the review

Gastroparesis has long been considered a rare condition, but the data show it's more widespread than previously understood.

To build this review, researchers pulled from a large US health study covering 82.6 million patients, one of the most comprehensive looks at the condition to date.

They also drew on two sets of clinical guidelines: one from the American College of Gastroenterology and a more recent update from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), published in 2025.

Together, these sources paint a much fuller picture of how common gastroparesis actually is, who's most at risk, and what treatment should look like today.

What gastroparesis actually is

Gastroparesis is a condition where the stomach empties more slowly than it should, not because of a physical blockage, but because the stomach's normal muscle contractions are reduced or the pylorus (the valve between the stomach and small intestine) doesn't relax properly. Food just sits there longer than it should.

Based on the review, the prevalence of confirmed gastroparesis was 21.5 per 100,000 people. That figure likely undercounts the true burden, since many cases go unrecognized or get misattributed to other digestive issues like acid reflux or IBS.

Women are diagnosed at a disproportionately high rate

Gastroparesis is diagnosed in women two to four times more often than in men, one of the most consistent patterns in the data.

The most common underlying cause is type 2 diabetes, which accounts for just over half of all cases. Post-surgical effects are the second most common cause, followed by medication-induced gastroparesis and idiopathic cases (meaning no clear cause was found). Type 1 diabetes and other causes make up the rest.

The review also identified several other risk factors:

Symptoms to watch for

The hallmark symptoms of gastroparesis include nausea, vomiting, feeling full after only a small amount of food, bloating, and abdominal pain or discomfort.

What makes it easy to miss is that these symptoms overlap with a range of other digestive issues, which can delay diagnosis by months or even years.

If you're experiencing a combination of these symptoms regularly, especially after meals, it's worth bringing up with your healthcare provider rather than writing it off as general digestive sensitivity.

The GLP-1 connection

If you're currently taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist (the class of medications that includes semaglutide, widely known under brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy), this review is especially important for you to know about.

GLP-1 receptor agonists are listed among the medications that can delay gastric emptying and contribute to gastroparesis, and the guidance recommends discontinuing them as part of treatment.

Other medications flagged as potential contributors include opioids, cannabis, and anticholinergics.

What eating with gastroparesis actually looks like

When your stomach is moving slowly, the goal is to make its job as easy as possible. The AGA's first-line recommendation is a small particle diet, meaning food that's been blended or chopped into small pieces, low in fat and hard-to-digest fiber. In practice, that looks like:

For the most treatment-resistant cases, there are two procedural options: G-POEM, an endoscopic procedure that relaxes the pylorus to help food pass through, and gastric electrical stimulation, where an implanted device sends gentle electrical pulses to the stomach muscle to help it contract.

When to talk to your doctor

If you're experiencing persistent nausea, feeling full after just a few bites, or unexplained vomiting (especially if you have diabetes, have had abdominal surgery, or are taking any of the medications mentioned above), it's worth bringing up with your doctor.

Gastroparesis is often missed or mistaken for something else, so the sooner it's on your provider's radar, the sooner you can start getting answers.

Diagnosing it usually involves a gastric emptying study. The most common test is gastric emptying scintigraphy: you eat a small meal and imaging tracks how quickly your stomach clears it.

If more than 10% of the food is still there after four hours, that's considered a positive result. There's also a breath test (the carbon-13 spirulina stable isotope breath test) that's FDA-approved as an alternative if scintigraphy isn't available.

The takeaway

Gastroparesis is underdiagnosed partly because its symptoms (nausea, bloating, feeling full too fast) are easy to attribute to something else.

Women are diagnosed at a significantly higher rate than men, and certain risk factors like diabetes and GLP-1 medications raise the odds further. If something feels consistently off after meals, it's worth naming it with your doctor.