Transcript
It comes down to whether these patients have symptoms and oftentimes, if they had some sort of inflammation or erosion of their stomach that was felt to be due to the H. Pylori. So a young person, we would probably give them the trial, they potent antacid first. That didn’t work. Then we may consider testing their blood for the presence of H. Pylori or we may get them to do a breath test where we can detect the presence of H. Pylori in their systems. If we noted that they didn’t quite respond or we thought that there may be something more serious going on, we might then go to endoscopy. An endoscopy is where you pass that lighted scope through the mouth, down the esophagus into the stomach, let’s say and you can look directly at the lining of the stomach and see if there’s an ulceration or inflammation. You can pass a small instrument obtained biopsies. We can send it to the lab and we can check to see if that H. Pylori bacteria is present or anything else. And we could make treatment recommendations based on that.