Comparison of methods for the diagnosis of H.pylori in gastric biopsy specimens from patients with different gastrointestinal diseases

This paper presents a comparison of cultural and rapid urease tests for the detection of H.pylori presence with PCR in biopsy specimens from patients diagnosed with gastroduodenitis, chronic gastritis, duodenitis and reflux oesophagitis. In general, there was a trend towards more false positive results when using the rapid urease testing method and false negatives when using the cultural method is used, but this pattern was statistically significant only for the diagnoses of gastroduodenitis (for all methods) and chronic gastritis (there was no statistically significant difference between PCR and the cultural method). A prognostic model was constructed to determine the effect of the test method on the outcome.