1 week Ago By Just Jared
Kenan Thompson is opening up about his health. The 46-year-old Saturday Night Live star recently confirmed he began struggling with painful heartburn, specifically when eating acidic foods. “I noticed that I would get hoarse a lot easier when I’m doing the show.
Losing my voice quicker, but also uncomfortable sleepless nights because I’m burping up acid, just kind of hiccuping all night,” he told People . “And that can definitely add more stress to an already stressful kind of environment doing a live show like that. So all of those factors, I was like whatever, I’ll get over it.
But it just started to pile up.” Keep reading to find out more..
. He tried avoiding trigger foods and taking over-the-counter medications at first. “I was able to take something and patch it up for the moment, but I got to a point where that didn’t work anymore.
That’s when it got serious,” he said. “It was a suffering-in-silence situation. I don’t know if I was necessarily embarrassed to talk to a doctor — I just didn’t know if I needed to.
” Once his symptoms became “most extreme” in early 2024, he finally went to a doctor and was immediately diagnosed with GERD, or gastroesophageal reflux disease, when stomach acid repeatedly flows back into the tube connecting your mouth and stomach (esophagus), otherwise known as acid reflux, which can irritate the lining of the esophagus. “I didn’t know there was a real medical term for it,” he said. The doctor prescribed him Voquezna, a potassium competitive acid blocker and the first and only FDA-approved treatment of its kind.
“I felt relief pretty immediately,” Kenan said. He’s now partnering with Phathom Pharmaceuticals for the GERD IS NO JOKE campaign to raise awareness about GERD and Voquezna. “I’ve had good training with SNL, just trying to take the comedic approach to tougher topics and make it more palatable to discuss,” he said.
“Sometimes you have to massage your way into it a little bit and just be like, alright, don’t freak out everybody, I’m doing a medication ad, but we need to do a deep dive on this. So if I throw a character in it, there’s some familiarity to go along with the messaging.” “God bless, I feel great,” he says of his health today.
“I’m in a much healthier kind of space with my daily lifestyle and meal decision-making and all of that good stuff. I’m in a good place.” He also addressed when he might leave SNL .
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