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Nobel Prize Awarded for Stomach Ulcer Discovery
gollum123 writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that the Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to two Australian scientists for their work with ulcers. Their research has shown that the majority of ulcers are caused by bacteria and can be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics. From the article: "Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium. The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas."
The Nobel Prize committee is almost as slow as Slashdot. The actual discovery, per TFA, was made in 1982.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
How stringent are the doctors in testing if you have an ulcer or not before handing out the drugs?
They're usually not too bad on testing for the ulcer itself. Unfortuately, they are quite happy to hand out powerful drugs for anything that appears to be gastritis.
The upshot is that the drugs they will give you (primarily antibiotics) are for short term use, and aren't that different from what they tend to give people "just in case". Though I have to wonder if some of the stomach damage isn't caused by reckless use of antibiotics. The human stomach is inteded to have a variety of bacteria to aid in digestion. Using antibiotics tends to nail ALL bacteria, including the stuff you want to keep.
Yogurt with live cultures is a good way of replacing Acidophilus, but if you've recently had antibiotics, you might want to think about a bottle of bacterial supplements. These can be had in pill form, but you *must* keep it cold and pay attention to the expiration date.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
First: Does H. pylori eradication lead to increased incidence of Barrett's esophagitis and esophageal cancer? Maybe. The jury is still out. The Japanese have just published a pretty comprehensive review (Japanese Journal of Clinical Medicine. 63(8):1383-6, 2005 Aug)on the subject. The increase in one may be more common with the eradication of the other. Fine. Are they casually related? That's a more complex question that I think the research is sorta investigating. I dont think Scientific American really has the answer.
But that's not the major issue. Stomach ulcer is a condition that PRIOR to the triple treatment (bismuth + antibiotics + acid inhibitors) would take months to years to heal. Some anecdotal stories as long as 6 years. More. Sometimes never. Leading to serious, serious complications that have even worse prognoses. You see what I'm getting at here. Quality of life years lost are huge, affecting huge chunks of the population. Known risk of causing stomach cancer, perforation of your guts (think your guts spilling into your abdominal cavity) and iron deficiency due to chronic bleeding just for a start. Now we're saying... OK. It MAY result in reflux, eosophageal cancer and Barrett's (cells in your eosophagus changing morphology).
Hardly the "eliminating H. pylori is worse than the symptoms created by too much of it." If anything, what this might suggest is that there might be some unwanted complications to altering the internal milieu of the stomach, and they should be addressed. Full stop. Sky's not falling yet, pal.
It's similar to Lynn Margulis' discovery that the mitochondria were originally their own organism and have since been integrated into our cells. She first made that claim in the 1980's, and only now has it started to become accepted dogma. It takes time to change minds, and she's still working on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
For proper cholesterol, well, stop eating *#$#$#* crap fats. Cholesterol is made by your liver based on the type of fat you eat.
Polyunsaturated fat - lowers total cholesterol levels
Unsaturated fat - increases good cholesterol
Saturated fat - increases bad cholesteros
Transfat - liquid plastic that'll make sure you get a quad bypass.
Much more important is to stop eating ALL polyunsaturated oils (hydrogenated oils/transfats are usually made from polyunsaturated oils), and replace them with saturated oils.
Fats that are less-than-fully-saturated quickly go rancid when exposed to oxygen.
The saturated fat in beef has been slandered in recent years as being unhealthy. It's not that the beef itself is unhealthy, but that most beef cattle are raised with an unatural diet that includes a great deal of polyunsaturated fats, in the form of grains/soybeans in feedlot animal feed.
Coconut Oil and its Virtues
The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. (intro chapter in PDF form)
The Tragic Legacy of CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest - instigated the anti-saturated fat campaign of the 1980's)
Also see the rest of the articles on fat at the Weston A. Price foundation site.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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