Treatment
Further information: Helicobacter pylori eradication protocolsOnce H. pylori is detected in a person with a peptic ulcer, the normal procedure is to eradicate it and allow the ulcer to heal. The standard first-line therapy is a one week "triple therapy" consisting of proton pump inhibitors such as omeprazole and the antibiotics clarithromycin and amoxicillin. Variations of the triple therapy have been developed over the years, such as using a different proton pump inhibitor, as with pantoprazole or rabeprazole, or replacing amoxicillin with metronidazole for people who are allergic to penicillin. Such a therapy has revolutionized the treatment of peptic ulcers, and has made a cure to the disease possible; previously, the only option was symptom control using antacids, H2-antagonists or proton pump inhibitors alone.
An increasing number of infected individuals are found to harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This results in initial treatment failure and requires additional rounds of antibiotic therapy or alternative strategies, such as a quadruple therapy, which adds a bismuth colloid, such as bismuth subsalicylate. For the treatment of clarithromycin-resistant strains of H. pylori, the use of levofloxacin as part of the therapy has been suggested.
An article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found evidence that "ingesting lactic acid bacteria exerts a suppressive effect on Helicobacter pylori infection in both animals and humans," noting that "supplementing with Lactobacillus—and Bifidobacterium-containing yogurt (AB-yogurt) was shown to improve the rates of eradication of H. pylori in humans."
Read more about this topic: Helicobacter Pylori
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)