Link: McGill researchers
Widely prescribed antacid drugs appear to be linked to a higher rate of C. difficile cases in people who have acquired the nasty bacterium outside of hospitals, a team of Montreal researchers reported Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Using data collected on the patients of family doctors in Britain, the researchers showed that non-hospitalized people who took drugs known as proton pump inhibitors were three and a half times more likely to develop Clostridium difficile than people who didn’t take the popular drugs.
Lead author Dr. Sandra Dial acknowledged the possible link between PPIs – as the drugs are called – and C. difficile is controversial. Until recently it was widely assumed that C. difficile-associated diarrhea was largely a disease one caught in hospitals and was almost always linked to antibiotic use.
But Dial and others are now exploring the notion that by focusing so closely on the role antibiotics play in triggering the disease, the medical community may have missed the full picture.
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Not just antacid drugs. Ordinary calcium carbonate antacid “heartburn” tablets can be a problem. After an All Day Breakfast at the Footlights pub in Spittal Street, Edinburgh, I was taking calcium carbonate antacid pills and suffered from severe diarrhea. Watching an episode of House about a case of a patient who had eaten unpasteurised cheese, House said that his taking antacids for acid flux provided a safe environment for bacteria.