Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a gram-negative bacterium found on the luminal surface of the gastric epithelium, was first isolated in 1984 (Marshall and Warren, 1984). It induces chronic inflammation of the underlying mucosa resulting in the development of important upper gastrointestinal diseases such as gastritis, peptic ulcer diseases, mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma, an...

Ammonia is one of the important toxins produced by Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), the major cause of peptic ulcer diseases. We examined whether glutamine or marzulene (a gastroprotective drug containing 1% sodium azulene and 99% glutamine) protects the gastric mucosa against H. pylori in vivo and investigated the mechanism underlying glutamine-induced mucosal protection against ammonia in gas...

Cancers arise as a consequence of multiple genetic and epigenetic alterations. Many genes aberrantly methylated in cancers have been identified in recent years, and their use in cancer diagnosis and therapy is currently under investigation. During our genome-wide screening for a novel tumor-suppressor gene in gastric cancers, we found that only a small amount of aberrant methylation was present...

Measurements were made of the amounts of histamine extracted from patients with peptic ulcer disease and control subjects suffering from various gastrointestinal diseases. Patients with duodenal ulcer, gastric ulcer, or recurrent duodenal ulcer after proximal gastric vagotomy often had less gastric mucosal histamine than did normal controls. Cimetidine therapy increased the amounts of the hista...

Helicobacter Pylori infection has been identified as a pathogenic factor in a number of gastroduodenal diseases, most importantly in gastric and duodenal ulcer disease. This association and the development of H. PYLORI eradication therapies has had a tremendous influence on the surgical therapy for these disorders. Decades ago, surgery was the therapy of choice for gastric and duodenal ulcers. ...

CagA, encoded by cytotoxin-associated gene A (cagA), is a major virulence factor of Helicobacter pylori, a gastric pathogen involved in the development of upper gastrointestinal diseases. Infection with cagA-positive H. pylori may also be associated with diseases outside the stomach, although the mechanisms through which H. pylori infection promotes extragastric diseases remain unknown. Here, w...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The lifestyle changes that have accompanied economic growth have influenced disease patterns in Korea. Changing patterns of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases over the past two decades were investigated in the present study. METHODS Data from inpatients with specific GI diseases, as defined by the International Classification of Diseases code, were extracted from the database at a...

BACKGROUND Serum pepsinogen (PG) levels are valuable in the diagnosis of gastric diseases. However, PG levels are affected by many factors such as the area and race. This study aimed to investigate serum PG levels in patients with different gastric diseases who were Chinese Han people in Hunan Province, midsouth China. METHODS A total of 248 gastric disease patients and 34 healthy controls we...

Biomarkers for various diseases have been extensively searched for the past 5 years. Nevertheless, most efforts were focused on the search for protein biomarkers from serum samples. In this work, we tried to look for peptide biomarkers from gastric juice samples with MALDI-TOF-MS. More than 200 gastric juice samples from healthy people, gastric ulcer patients, duodenal ulcer patients, and cance...