Dr. Amy Nett: I don’t find blood testing for Helicobacter pylori is useful because that more often indicates prior exposure and may not be as useful for determining whether or not you want to pursue treatment. We most commonly, for initial diagnosis, use stool testing through BioHealth. Initially when I first started working with Chris, we were really only using the Doctor’s Data stool test, and we started noticing that Helicobacter pylori essentially never came back positive, which didn’t mirror the known incidence of Helicobacter pylori. I think that was actually what prompted Chris to suggest we run Doctor’s Data stool testing along with the BioHealth stool testing, run them alongside each other, and when we did that, we started seeing that BioHealth was actually showing positive Helicobacter pylori results, whereas Doctor’s Data was not picking those up, and the BioHealth results seemed to mirror the incidence of H. pylori a little bit better.
Yes, Doctor’s Data does offer H. pylori stool testing. That said, I would have concerns about a lot of potential false negatives. Again, if patients are concerned about money and they’re not willing or able to do two different stool tests, you could do the Doctor’s Data CSAPx3. The H. pylori stool test for them would be an add-on, so you’d have to the CSAPx3 plus the H. pylori add-on, so what you can do instead is do the Doctor’s Data CSAPx3 and then the BioHealth #418. The #418 is just a Helicobacter pylori test. That’s for initial diagnosis.
If someone has Helicobacter pylori, we generally do treatment—again, we’ll talk about treatment protocol—but then after treatment, we suggest that patients wait about four weeks. Four weeks after testing, we generally run both the BioHealth #418 and we run a breath test. We go through MetSol for that. Metabolic Solutions, I believe, is the name of the lab. We’ll talk about that in more detail later. That’s our approach. We’ll use the breath testing and stool testing for confirmation of successful eradication. We talked last week about not using breath testing for initial diagnosis because it’s not as specific for Helicobacter pylori.