【 Hot Topic Response 】 Chinese scientists provide a new answer to eradicate Helicobacter pylori. Recently, this news has attracted widespread attention. The team led by Professor Zhou Liya and Professor Song Zhiqiang from the Department of Gastroenterology at Peking University Third Hospital, along with 40 digestive disease diagnosis and treatment centers across the country, has discovered that the triple therapy regimen containing levofloxacin has the potential to bring Helicobacter pylori treatment back to the era of simpler triple therapy. The relevant results were recently published online in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. How is the situation of Helicobacter pylori infection? Was there a corresponding treatment plan before? What are the special features of the latest plan? On October 22nd, reporters from Science and Technology Daily interviewed Zhou Liya and Song Zhiqiang, who led the research on these issues. First question: What diseases can Helicobacter pylori cause? Helicobacter pylori is a Gram negative, microaerophilic bacterium that can colonize the surface of human gastric mucosal epithelium and cause chronic active gastritis. Helicobacter pylori infection is clearly defined as a infectious diseases and infectious disease. Song Zhiqiang introduced that Helicobacter pylori infection has the characteristics of high infection rate, wide disease spectrum, great harm, and good bactericidal benefits. This disease is a typical "disease that enters through the mouth" and can be transmitted between people. At present, Helicobacter pylori has infected nearly half of the population and 70% of households in China. It is related to many common diseases, such as gastric cancer, peptic ulcer, atrophic gastritis, etc., and is an important health issue in China. Question 2: Can Helicobacter pylori infection be cured? High quality international consensus, systematic reviews, and multicenter randomized controlled trials consistently indicate that the vast majority of patients can achieve successful eradication through rational selection of treatment plans. Helicobacter pylori infection can be eradicated and treated, but due to drug resistance, poor accessibility, and frequent allergic reactions, the selection of antibiotics related to Helicobacter pylori treatment in China is currently facing many difficulties, which affects the effectiveness of eradication treatment. ”Zhou Liya said. Eradicating Helicobacter pylori can significantly reduce the risk of gastric cancer and is an important strategy for preventing gastric cancer. Therefore, eradicating Helicobacter pylori is not only feasible, but also a necessary intervention recommended in clinical practice. ”Song Zhiqiang stated that in order to cope with the current severe situation of eradication treatment and overcome the significant increase in drug resistance, new treatment plans are urgently needed for Helicobacter pylori infection. Question 3: What are the differences between the latest plan and previous therapies? The latest triple therapy is based on levofloxacin, which is "levofloxacin+rabeprazole+amoxicillin", twice daily for a 14 day course. The commonly used bismuth quadruple therapy in clinical practice is "clarithromycin+rabeprazole+amoxicillin+bismuth", twice daily for a 14 day course of treatment. Zhou Liya introduced that levofloxacin is the world's first independently developed new molecular entity drug in China, specifically developed for Helicobacter pylori infection. Both basic and clinical research results show that Helicobacter pylori is generally sensitive to this drug, which can effectively overcome the problem of high resistance of Helicobacter pylori and demonstrate high safety. The research team led by Zhou Liya and Song Zhiqiang conducted the world's first phase III clinical trial around levofloxacin. This multicenter, randomized, double-blind study included 700 first-time treatment patients with Helicobacter pylori infection. Clinical trial data shows that the new triple therapy scheme exhibits outstanding advantages: for the main analyzed population, its eradication rate reaches 92.0%, which is better than the traditional scheme's 87.9%; Faced with the clinical challenge of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, the new plan achieved a breakthrough of 89.9%, which is 2 percentage points higher than the traditional plan. More importantly, the incidence of adverse reactions in the new triple therapy was significantly reduced. The study also confirmed that the triple therapy containing rifampicin has a higher eradication success rate and lower incidence of adverse reactions compared to the quadruple therapy with bismuth, and requires less medication and is more convenient to take. The triple therapy containing rifampicin provides a new bactericidal tool for clinical practice, which will greatly improve the eradication efficacy of Helicobacter pylori, "said Song Zhiqiang. (New Society)