Something’s just come up today again and I think we need to talk about it. A positive result on a stool PCR microbiome test for H. pylori, understandably, might be heard as a clear call to action to go in guns blazing with an eradication approach. But is it? Trust me, I’ve had more than my fair share of battles with this bug & can understand being keen to have it be gone BUT first things first, let’s be clear about what the result speaks to.
Does it say, “Here! Look over here! Here’s the source of your patient’s GIT distress,” or even, “Here’s a pathogen that has taken up residence in their GIT and is a risk for future dx!”
No, not necessarily. It speaks to its presence.
And that may be only fleetingly, as it passes through. I’ve seen it before and so have many other experienced practitioners: a positive stool PCR that is at odds with the results of gold standard H.pylori testing, the UBT, faecal antigens or blood serology, all freely available through the GP. And the reality is, if you have a negative UBT, there’s no urease production, the trademark trouble-making of this bug. If you have negative blood serology, your immune system has never ‘met’ this bug or, in the minority of cases, you’ve tested in that brief early exposure window prior to antibody production (2wks) so you should retest within the month, to confirm or refute. And if you don’t have any faecal antigen…it ain’t in da’ house…so to speak 😅 If there’s something new here, then have a quick read of Medscape’s great work-up summary. So, clearly we need to confirm before we open fire.
We (me included) have been so single-minded about increasing the ‘sensitivity’ with our testing methods, we may have left ‘specificity’, in broader sense, behind & that creates a new problem.
This leads us and the patient down the garden path of false attribution and time and money wasted ‘treating’ a ghost gut issue. And no one wants to be put on a pylori protocol when they really didn’t need to. Trust me 🙄 But if someone does come back confirmed, well then…
H.pylori – Eradicate or Rehabilitate?
For a bacteria identified just a few decades ago as being a cause of chronic gastritis, atrophic gastritis and gastric carcinoma, the escalation of number of antibiotics used to eradicate it (4 at last count + PPI) has been nothing short of breath-taking. A management approach more consistent with both integrative medicine and with an improved understanding of the delicate microbiome focuses on changing the gastric environment to ‘remove the welcome mat’. What do we know about how to do this successfully? It turns out…quite a lot.