Prevalence of Campylobacter pylori in a Tertiary Care Hospital in the Mid-Atlantic United States-Reply

In Reply. —We thank Dr Rothstein and colleagues for their interest and additional information on the prevalence of Campylobacter pylori (Helicobacter pylori) in their population. The point about the incidence of C pylori increasing with the severity of the gastritis prompted us to review our data and examine whether we could also demonstrate this correlation. During the study the histologic grading was done by the same pathologist so as to keep the grading at least internally consistent. The problem is that it is difficult to standardize the grading in order to compare data of different investigators. For instance, the term "inactive" gastritis may not correspond to the 1+ grade in our study which we, by definition, considered as "normal." Nevertheless, our retrospective analysis indicated that using the published grading system, of the patients reported in our article, the breakdown was the following: 16 patients (grade 0); 24 patients (grade 1+);