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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!
He actually found a cause, and proposed a cure. Most modern barbers are happy to continually treat symptoms since that's what brings in the big bucks.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Infect the researchers.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Possibly the best quote from a scientist ever (my emphasis):
From another BBC article
Mr Warren said he was a "little overcome" by the award.
"It is nice to be officially recognised and it gives some sort of a stamp of approval, but we believed it within a few months because it was so bloody obvious," he told reporters.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
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
Boredom?
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About time this happened.
;) ), and a month later, she's fine!
My mother was the unfortunate sufferer of a stomach ulcer for almost 30 years of her life.
One day, her doctor finds out she has it (after all, who keeps trying to fix a 30 year old condition that hasn't killed you yet?), and gives her the newly recognised course of broad-spectrum anti-biotics & neutralisers (since the stomach is kinda hard to treat, acidic n all, tends to destroy the anti-biotics before they have an effect
It's scary how long it took for the standard opinion to get torn down, and how simple the final answer really was! In hindsight, the original theory sounds decidedly suspicious. Stress, indeed.
ashridah
Smart thinking. You either get a Nobel Prize or a Darwin Award. A win-win situation.
And all this time I thought it was the pizza, beer, nachos and salsa I cram into my face daily. Now that I know it's bacteria, I have to make a call for some anti-biotics...and another double pepperoni!
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Peppermint oil.
Seriously - been on them for a week, no symptoms. Not a cure, but a hell of a better life.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
So Ulcers . . . Are not caused by stress?
Peeve alert: starting sentences in the subject line and finishing them in the body is annoying. Just so you know.
Anyway, what I really am posting about, though, is that stress weakens the immune system, giving the bacteria the ability to take hold. There are other, similarly-behaved things, such as eczema (a skin affliction), which is viral, but will mostly only manifest when you are stressed badly.
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Years before this discovery was made, stomach ulcers like so many other health problems always used to be labelled by the doctors as a "stress" or "lifestyle" related condition, without any proof that anything more definite than that was really directly responsible. Even to this day, it is amazing that medicine still has literally thousands of loosely-defined medical "conditions" and "syndromes" which have no known specific cause but which are nonetheless given proper names for doctors to use as convenient diagnostic labels. Doctors are still trained to diagnose these "conditions", rather than to think harder about possible underlying cause(s). The two scientists in this story were brave enough to challenge the conventional wisdom of their peers that stress and lifestyle factors cause stomach ulcers. It's interesting to wonder how many other "conditions" are actually caused by undetected bacteria or viruses which are waiting to be discovered by scientists prepared to challenge the prevailing dogma.
Scroogle
He infected /himself/? I thought that was what TA's and Post-grads were for.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Nobel prize, on the other hand, is awarded purely for groundbreaking research, usually on the basis of a single seminal piece of research but sometimes something more like a 'lifetime acheivement' award. In almost all cases, it is awarded long after the original research, when the impact can be properly judged in the historical context. For many Nobel lauriates, the work they received the prize for was an exception in an otherwise ordinary career. And in some cases, (the physics prize for the 3K microwave cosmic background comes to mind) the recipents were not actually scientists, but just stumbled upon the discovery by accident.
"We propose that this condition is not precipitated by an agitated state of humors, but by tiny microbes". The stress model of disease has always been a bit too subjective and artificial for me. Stress is still generically cited as being responsible for heart disease and depression. It's not even so much that stress is blamed, but the assumed endpoint of a personal reaction. Stress is supposedly something we can control... a reaction to the events of our day. Treating as it presently is, it's almost like a supernatural power. Stress may be associated with events and feelings, but it's also a cascade of chemical messengers that are amenable to study. Why not dig deeper into what reactions and dynamics the release of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine induce? There is a medical prejudice against things brain related. If diabetes was primarily associated with a mood disorder, would it have been researched as well? I guess the special case argument for the ignorance of microbes in ulcers has to do with the assumption that bacteria don't grow well in the environment of the stomach, but still. Any identifiable condition that is currently written off as an intangible artifact of one's personality type seems ripe for rediscovery, and there are still plenty, especially in gastroenterology and physchiatry. It's no surprise to me that this discovery was in the GI field. It's this lack of basic research that keeps open a market for herbalists, homeopaths, and their ilk.
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.
I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway.
Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.
On the other hand, blind believe in the face of evidence strikes me more as dogmatism. And there certainly has been a lot of that in the history of science.
-Stu
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
Concerning an excess of heat. Don't forget that putting interstitial hydrogen into a metal is an exothermic process. We could generate heat, in fact we scared the h*ll out of ourselves with one of the 'deuterium gas in titanium' experiments. It generated so much heat that we were afraid about the strenght of the container. Pure hydrogen exploding into air could really ruin your day. This also produced counts in a neutron detector, but these were consistent with the known temperature sensitivity of the detectors. So, we did see heat, but only heat that could be understood in terms of basic chemistry.
I will state that I was rather skeptical of the whole topic, but I did work for the DOE and I would have been happy to be proven wrong. Free, clean energy is worth more than my pride. So, even if the odds were a million to one against success, the DOE is justified in studying this topic. There just were not results that could be reproduced. As Fermi noted, 'Anything worth doing once is worth doing twice.' If you can't do it twice, it isn't science.
Please, prove that this works. But extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Finding a way to overcome nuclear forces (potential barriers of millions of electron volts) with electrostatic forces at THERMAL energies (tens of milli electron-Volts)is an extraordinary. Perhaps something like sonoluminescence can produce very high localised temperatures in a jar of water, but this produces light with a few electron volts. The probability of particles tunneling across a barrier varies as exp( -E/kT) as long as E is millions of electron volts and kT is around 60 meV, you have a number like exp(-10^7). These basic considerations make CF an extraordinary claim. Where is the extraordinary evidence?
Think global, act loco
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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