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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!
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