Helicobacter pylori Infection Clusters in Families of Healthy Individuals

Abstract

Within the past decade it has been established that the Helicobacter pylori organism is the most common cause of chronic gastritis and H. pylori gastritis is strongly linked to peptic ulcer disease [6]. The epidemiology of H. pylori infection is beginning to be understood, but the data concerning possible reservoirs and transmission are scanty [1–3, 5, 7–9,11–18]. Several studies have investigated the parents and siblings of children with symptomatic H. pylori infection and have reported a higher frequency of H. pylori infection among families of infected symptomatic children than among controls [3, 16]. The focus of our studies has been to attempt to avoid the bias associated with patient-based studies and to perform traditional epidemiologic studies in the healthy population. In this study, we investigated whether there was clustering of H. pylori infection within family units of healthy volunteers. We defined the status of the family on the basis of the results of H. pylori status in an index parent. We found that H. pylori infection was strikingly more frequent in the spouse and children of families in whom the index parent was infected, suggesting that person-to-person transmission or common source infection occurs frequently.