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Q: I was told by my doctor that I have an ulcer. He looked in my intestines with a tube and did a biopsy. He gave me some medicines, including some antibiotics. He said that he gave me these antibiotics because there were some bacteria in the tissue he biopsied., which he thought might be responsible for causing the disease. This confused me. How can antibiotics help for ulcers?
A: This question illustrates very clearly how medicine has been changing over the last few years, and, in particular, how the concept of ulcer formation and treatment has changed recently.
An ulcer is a break of the inner lining of the wall of the stomach or the duodenum, in which this break is somewhat more extensive and penetrates through deeper linings of these organs. (The duodenum is the upper part of the intestinal tract, just beyond the stomach).
In contrast to was previously believed, it has been shown over the last few years that certain bacteria, referred to as helicobacter pylori, have been cultured in about 90% of the patients with duodenal ulcer and about 80% of the patients with gastric ulcer(stomach ulcer). Therefore, in order to eradicate the bacteria, it is important to treat the patients with suitable antibiotics to kill them. Failure to eradicate these bacteria will result in the reappearance of the ulcer if suitable antibiotic therapy is not given in addition to the standard antacid ulcer treatment. Although the exact mechanism by which these bacteria produce ulcers, there is presently no doubt that the presence of these organisms is a major causative factor of the disease in a large number of cases.
Updated: 12/21/98
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