REVIEW: Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach of patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration

 Your stomach hurts from ulcers? Drink milk. Where did those ulcers come from? Stress. This is what I heard all my life before I went to undergrad. It was only then that I learned the vicious truth: my mom is a liar. She spread insidious lies about where christmas gifts come from, where my baby teeth went, and where ulcers come from. It turns out that christmas gifts came from them, my baby teeth went onto a necklace that she wears to this day, and ulcers come from bacteria, Helicobacter pylori to be exact.

 For a long time, people thought that stress was this magical thing that could just destroy your body with plenty of warning, but no scientific basis. Today's paper, published in the Lancet in 1984 showed a correlation between bacteria presence and ulcer incidence. Let me explain.

Despotellis fought Leezle Pon and could definitely take down a sentient H. pylori.

 Prior to the researchers' research, there was a lot of evidence that bacteria were found repeatedly in ulcers, but they were mis-identified and forgotten. The researchers decided to confirm the presence of bacteria in patients with ulcers and then to identify those bacteria. They took 100 patients and questioned them about their lifestyles to determine how the bacteria got in the body. There seemed to be no consistent routes, but burping was more common in patients with bacteria than those without.

 Of these patients, cells were removed from several areas within the gastrointestinal tract and tested for the presence of bacteria. The test for presence of bacteria being smearing on blood agar or chocolate agar plates and waiting for growth, in this case four days. Their data show that duodenal ulcers are always correlated with bacteria and, overall, all ulcers are 87% likely to involve bacteria! Their cultures showed a spiral bacteria with 36 % GC content of the DNA and unique flagella. They initially called it Campylobacter pyloridis, but later it would be changed to Helicobacter pylori.