Increased parietal cell responsiveness to tetragastrin in patients with recurrent duodenal ulcer

To clarify the contributive factors in the recurrence of duodenal ulcer, the present study was carried out on 65 male patients with active duodenal ulcers and 20 healthy male subjects. After having verified that the ulcer had healed, gastric acid secretory responses to graded doses of tetragastrin from 62.5 to 16,000 ng/kg/hr were investigated using a logarithmic transformation model. Several clinical features were also investigated. The patients were divided into three groups based on the later endoscopic follow-up study for two years. The early-recurrent group included 16 patients with recurrence occurring within three months. The late-recurrent group included 25 with recurrence occurring after three months. The nonrecurrent group included 24 patients without recurrences during the follow-up period. The 20 healthy male subjects were defined as a control group. The results were as follows: (1) Significant differences were not discerned either in basal and peak acid outputs between the three patients groups. (2) The ED50 value for tetragastrin was lower in the early-recurrent group than in the other three groups. (3) The early-recurrent group showed a higher percentage of smokers than the other patient groups. These results suggest that smoking and increased parietal cell responsiveness correlates strongly with duodenal ulcer recurrence.