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A bacterium called Helicobacter pylori is the chief culprit in gastritis, ulcers and stomach cancer. Antioxidant nutrients can protect you.

For decades, physicians believed ulcers were caused by too much stomach acid. It was a simple idea, based on the belief that excess acid would eat away at the stomach’s lining. Bland diets and drugs to reduce stomach acid were the treatments of choice, though their long-term benefits were questionable.

By the mid-1990s, it became clear that ulcers were usually the result of a gastrointestinal infection with Helicobacter pylori bacteria. Again, the cure seemed obvious enough. Patients were treated with antibiotics, and the infection and ulcer went away. Yet doctors failed to answer a key question: why do 80 percent of people infected with H. pylori never develop ulcers?

The answer may be antioxidants. H. pylori infections significantly reduce stomach and blood levels of key dietary antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and beta-carotene. Low levels of these antioxidants leave the stomach highly vulnerable to hazardous molecules known as free radicals, which can damage stomach cells and set the stage for cancer. Conversely, antioxidant supplements (even without antibiotics) can often eradicate H. pylori infections.

But there’s more at stake than just ulcers. Untreated chronic H. pylori infections boost the risk of stomach cancer by up to 80 percent. Although stomach cancer doesn’t garner a lot of headlines, it is the second most common fatal cancer in the world, and in most countries the five-year survival rates are less than 20 percent. However, recent studies have found that antioxidant supplements can also reverse precancerous changes in the stomach.

Infection Depletes Antioxidant Levels

Discovered in the stomach in 1983, H. pylori is a bacterium involved in a continuum of three diseases: gastritis, gastric or duodenal ulcers, and stomach cancer. Gastritis, an inflammation of the stomach wall, increases the risk of ulcers; ulcers subsequently increase the risk of stomach cancer.

When H. pylori infects the stomach or duodenum (the top few inches of the small intestine, located right below the stomach), the immune system responds by flooding the area with a variety of white blood cells. Normally, these cells use free radicals to destroy the infecting bacteria. However, according to Peter Ernst, DVM, PhD, a researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, this powerful immune response cannot always eradicate H. pylori infections. Nonetheless, white blood cells continue their attack, with free radicals damaging the stomach wall and potentially causing inflammation, chronic gastritis and mutations that may lead to cancer.

Research shows H. pylori depletion of antioxidant levels is made worse when people consume few antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables. In a study of 1,106 men and women, researchers at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, reported that H. pylori infection interfered with the body’s utilization of vitamin C. When people infected with H. pylori also ate few fruits and vegetables, their vitamin C levels dropped to one-third less than normal. Another study at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, found people with H. pylori had only one-fifteenth the vitamin C in their gastric acid compared with healthy subjects.

Similar patterns have been noted with vitamin E and beta-carotene. Satheesh Nair, MD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,

Baltimore, and his colleagues, recently found that patients with gastritis had low blood and stomach levels of vitamin E. People with gastric ulcers, a more serious condition, had significantly lower levels of vitamin E, vitamin C, beta-carotene and other carotenoids.

Antioxidants Protect Against Stomach Cancer

Researchers estimate that 50 to 73 percent of stomach cancers are the result of H. pylori infection (Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2000; 92:1881-1888). One study found H. pylori increased the risk of precancerous changes to stomach cells and outright cancer by 80 percent. However, high levels of vitamin C definitely appear to be protective. A study of 2,646 people, conducted at the National Cancer

Institute, Bethesda, MD, found that high blood levels of vitamin C were associated with an 80 percent reduction in stomach cancer risk.

References available on request. Jack Challem, "The Nutrition Reporter," is a leading health writer with 25 years of experience reporting the latest research on nutrition, vitamins and minerals. He is the author of The Inflammation Syndrome (John Wiley & Sons, March 2003) and the lead author of the best-selling Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). Information on Jack’s latest book is at inflammationsyndrome.com.

Source: alive #248, June 2003