Digestive Diseases and Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 7 (JM~ I995), p. 1463

LETI’ER TO THE EDITOR

GASTROSPIRILLUM HOMZNZS IN ASYMPTOMATIC HEALTHY INDMDUALS

TO Kke Editor: We agree that the awareness of the pathologist and

the method(s) of investigation (histology, cytologic imprints) influence data about the prevalence of G. hominis in various populations. However, we do not have experience with imprints from biopsies. We used conventional histology for the detection of spiral bac- teria in close topographic relation to the stomach epithelium and compared the results with data ob- tained by the same method.

We reported the colonization of the antral mucosa with G. hominis in two of 175 asymptomatic healthy volunteers (Dig Dis Sci 38:2087-2089, 1993). Both volunteers, although asymptomatic, had moderately active chronic gastritis. It was explicitly not our aim to determine the prevalence of this spiral bacterium in the general population, ie, in asymptomatic individu- als. To achieve this, the subjects should be selected at random, not recruited by local advertising, as was done in our study. Further, because of the presumably low prevalence of G. hominis, a large group of “healthy” individuals should be examined.

We do not have extensive data on the prevalence of G. hominis in symptomatic patients seen in our insti- tution. We estimate it to be lower than 0.5%. Weg- mann et al (1) reported a prevalence of 0.3% in all antral biopsies (N = 1551) performed in patients living in a region adjacent to the geographic area of our study and at a comparable time. Finally, Heilman and Borchard (2) found a prevalence of 0.25% among 15,180 antral biopsies from patients in Germany.

LUCA ~~AZZUCCHELLI, MD Institute of Pathology

University of Bern Bern, Switzerland

REFERENCES

1. Wegmann W, Aschwanden M, Schaub N, Aenishtinslin W, Gyr K: Gastrospidlim-hominis-assoziierte Gastritis-eine Zoonose. Schweiz Med Wochenschr 121:245-254, 1991

2. Heilmann KL, Borchard F: Gastritis due to spiral shaped bac- teria other than I+elic&ac~er @ti: Clinical, histoIogicai, and ultrastructural findings. Gut 32: 137-140, 1991

Digestive Dkeam and Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 7 (Jury 1995) 0 163-Z 116/9S/O700-1463$07.50/O 0 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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