Management of Helicobacter pylori-related disorders

The discovery of Helicobacter pylori has opened new opportunities in the management of gastrointestinal disorders, with the cure of chronic ulcer disease now being possible for the first time. The 1994 United States National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference recommended that patients with duodenal or gastric ulcers unrelated to the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) should be given eradication therapy. These guidelines were refined at a conference held recently in Maastricht. The updated guidelines strongly recommend treatment in patients with duodenal or gastric ulcer disease, low-grade mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) gastric lymphoma, gastritis with severe macro- or microscopic changes and after resection of early gastric cancer. Despite a lack of hard scientific evidence, the guidelines also suggest that eradication treatment is advisable in patients with unequivocally diagnosed functional dyspepsia, a family history of gastric cancer, long-term treatment with proton-pump inhibitors for gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD), planned or existing NSAID treatment, after gastric surgery for ulcer or cancer, or if the patient wants to be treated. Many different therapeutic regimens have been used previously, but at present the best treatment is proton-pump inhibitor-based triple therapy, comprising a proton-pump inhibitor plus two drugs out of clarithromycin, a nitroimidazole and amoxycillin. One-week low-dose triple therapy cures 85-95% of infected patients.