[The 13C-urea breath test efficacy in determining Helicobacter pylori eradication]

Helicobacter pylori eradication therapy is useful and requires more precise determination of actual eradication. Patients often become positive for Helicobacter pylori again after presumed eradication. Reinfection is thought rare and patients with positive reconversion may be false-negative at determination. After a year, positive reconversion was 26.8% in our work after determination by culture and histopathological methods and 4.3% after these were combined with urea breath test (UBT). The positive reconversion rate is significantly lower after combination with UBT, suggesting the usefulness of UBT in determining Helicobacter pylori eradication. This may be because UBT includes no biopsy, eliminating sampling error, and highly sensitive UBT detects traces of Helicobacter pylori. The UBT is thus expected to become widely used to determine Helicobacter pylori eradication.