The association ofHelicobacter pyloriwith peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer was first proposed by Warren and Marshall in 1983 (Warren and Marshall, 1983). In February 1994, the National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference concluded thatH. pylori infection is themajor cause of peptic ulcer disease, and all patients with confirmed peptic ulcer disease associatedwithH. pylo...

The 13/14C-Urea breath test (UBT) is based on the simple principle that a solution of isotopically labelled urea will be rapidly hydrolysed by the abundantly expressed urease of H pylori. The released 13/14CO2 is absorbed across the mucus layer to the gastric mucosa and hence, via the systemic circulation, excreted in the expired breath. Distribution of urea throughout the stomach prevents samp...

OBJECTIVE Concern about excessive alcohol consumption by college students has been raised by surveys indicating that more than 40% of students are "heavy" drinkers. This definition is based on students' reports of consuming five or more drinks (four or more for women) on an occasion sometime during the past 2 weeks. The present survey examines the degree to which this 2-week 5+/4+ drink criteri...

Background The sensitivity of peripheral chemoreflex is a marker of the severity of heart failure and the prognosis of the outcome in these patients. The assessment of chemosensitivity in these patients remains an actual problem. Objective The aim of the study was to explore the relationship between a Breath-Holding Test (BHT) and single-breath carbon dioxide test and to evaluate the reliabil...

Breath tests have been used in research laboratories for over 25 y. Originally, the tests were based on the use of C, rather than on the nonradioactive isotope, C. When C became widely available at a reasonable cost, research groups in the United States and Europe developed methodologies to measure C abundance in samples of CO2. The tests used a variety of substrates and measured pancreatic fun...

A non-invasive serological assay devised in this laboratory had a sensitivity and specificity of 100% as determined by culture and confirmed by histology in a group of 47 patients who had undergone endoscopy. The correlation between serology and the non-invasive [14C] breath test was very good. Only one of 24 culture positive patients was, while all 23 culture negative patients were, breath tes...

Breath tests allow a non-invasive and fast diagnostic of different specific enzymes' phenotypic functionality. Over the last decade several 13C-breath tests were successfully tested, with the (13)C-urea breath test being approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The use of other targets than labeled (13)CO2 in exhaled breath offers additional...

Sixty pregnant women whose fetuses were considered to be at high risk were intensively studied with fetal and placental function tests. Fetal breathing movements were studied with real-time ultrasound and the amount of time spent breathing and the variability of the breath-to-breath interval were measured. A reduction in the amount of time the fetus spent making breathing movements and decrease...

Five patients with sucrase-isomaltase deficiency, and one patient with primary glucose-galactose malabsorption had no increases in breath hydrogen excretion after oral sucrose or glucose. Anaerobic incubation with sugars of stool suspensions from 5 patients with primary sugar malabsorption produced by trace of hydrogen (17 microliter) in only one, while those from 13 or 14 controls produced a m...

Standards for patient care and especially for pulmonary function testing have become important world wide, especially in the United States [1, 2, 3]. Recently the American Thoracic Society (ATS) has published two new statements. One is an update of its spirometry standardization [1] and the other recommends standard techniques for the single breath diffusion capacity (transfer factor) or DLCo [...