Gaming for Gastroparesis Charity Recap 2021
Written by: CDHF
Updated: November 30th, 2022
CDHF’s Third Annual Gaming for Gastroparesis Charity Stream Marathon was a smashing success!
What a wonderful day it was – full of fun, excitement, and support for a great cause. On August 21st, Jennifer (otherwise known as @Astreigha), who is our Gaming for Gastroparesis Charity Stream organizer and gastroparesis warrior, took to Twitch. This was the third event that Jennifer has spearheaded for gastroparesis, and it was a huge hit! This year’s charity stream raised $2,176, with a total over the three years of $5591 for gastroparesis awareness and research initiatives! The full video stream can be found here.
Jennifer has been a gastroparesis patient since 2005. To learn more about Jennifer and her journey, click here to listen to her story.
If you’ve never heard of Twitch, it is an online platform where gamers can live stream video games they are playing. Viewers are able to log on and watch them, chat and even interact with the gamer as they play. One of the greatest things about the platform is the ability to use it to do good in the world through charity streaming. What’s better than combining something fun with something that can help people?!
Since the initiative began in 2019, we’ve been lucky enough to team up with Astreigha and a number of other streamers to raise money for gastroparesis research and awareness initiatives. This year was especially fun, considering the incentives that were set up for each fundraising milestone reached.
Most of these milestones centered around Dom (@Vaynum), Astreigha’s husband. Let me tell you – this gentleman is a good sport! These incentives certainly worked in motivating viewers to donate. Check out this list – what a day!
Dom eats a Dill Pickle Cupcake
Dom eats Carolina Reaper Fiery Beanboozled
Dom eating pure Lemon Juice Freezer Pop
With all the success from the fundraiser, it’s not surprising that Jennifer got a bit emotional at times. They hit their $1000 goal incredibly early in the day – check out her reaction here.
CDHF is blown away by the generosity and support for this Gaming for Gastroparesis Charity Marathon. We are officially a part of the gaming community, and you bet that we’re here to stay! We will not stop generating awareness and working towards finding a cure for this disease.
In early 2021, the CDHF began a consultation process to better understand the needs and barriers faced by patients living with gastroparesis. Despite the significant number of Canadians affected by this condition, research and characterization of the clinical features of gastroparesis are limited and are made more difficult to understand because care is fragmented, often misdiagnosed or managed by primary care providers.
Through the consultation process, the CDHF learned there is great interest from the patient and clinician community to establish a Canadian gastroparesis registry. The objective of a patient gastroparesis registry would be to collect detailed epidemiological, clinical, psychological, and patient outcome data to classify patients with gastroparesis and gastroparesis-like (symptoms of gastroparesis but normal gastric emptying) syndromes into defined phenotypes (disease characteristics).
There is an opportunity for CDHF to be an influential leader in the compilation, analysis and sharing of critical information for those living with gastroparesis.
A gastroparesis patient registry would enhance our understanding of the disorder and make patient data available to Canadian researchers, encouraging collaboration, discovery of novel therapies and dissemination of information through knowledge translation to the patient community.
Want to get involved in the Gaming for Gastroparesis Charity Stream next year?
Although the gaming for gastroparesis charity stream marathon is now complete for 2021, if you would like to get involved with gaming for gastroparesis in the future, feel free to message Astreigha at twitter.com/Astreigha or email her at astreigha@gmail.com.
More on Gastroparesis:
What is gastroparesis?
Gastroparesis is a debilitating digestive disorder. It is extremely difficult to treat and has very few treatment options. There is no cure.
Gastroparesis is also often referred to as delayed gastric emptying. The term “gastric” refers to the stomach. Usually, the stomach voids its contents in a disciplined fashion into the small intestine. In gastroparesis, the muscle contractions that allow the food to move along the digestive tract do not function normally and the stomach does not empty quickly enough. Gastroparesis is defined by long-term symptoms combined with postponed stomach emptying in the absence of any observable obstruction or blockage. The delayed stomach emptying is confirmed by a test.
What causes gastroparesis?
The cause of gastroparesis is often unclear. However, it has been observed that in many cases, gastroparesis is caused by damage to the vagus nerve (an important link from the gut to the brain.)
The vagus nerve is responsible for managing the intricate mechanisms in your digestive tract, including communicating to the muscles in your stomach when to contract and move food into the small intestine. An impaired vagus nerve cannot signal normally to your stomach muscles. This causes food to remain in your stomach for a longer period of time, rather than pushing into your small intestine to continue the digestion process.
Factors that cause vagus nerve damage can be attributed to diseases, such as diabetes, or by surgery to the stomach or small intestine.
Do you have gastroparesis? Download our medical awareness card!
