2 ms·
All non-carriers are also at risk of developing cancer. How much worse does H. pylori make that situation? Combining some reports from various places: > Infec
by thaumasiotes 2y ago
All non-carriers are also at risk of developing cancer. How much worse does H. pylori make that situation?
Combining some reports from various places:
> Infection of the stomach with H. pylori is not the cause of illness itself; over half of the global population is infected but most are asymptomatic.
> Infection with H. pylori is responsible for around 89 per cent of all gastric cancers
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori )
> 770,000 deaths of gastric cancer were estimated in 2020
( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00134-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... )
58 million deaths worldwide in 2019 according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year ; I picked 2019 instead of 2020 because 2020 features a spike in deaths for reasons that I'm assuming are unrelated to cancer.
That puts gastric cancer deaths from H. pylori at just under 1.2% of all deaths, which frankly seems ridiculously high.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/stomach.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/stomach.html suggests that stomach cancer is 1.8% of all cancer deaths (in the USA), which is perfectly compatible with the above statistics as long as cancer is the cause of 67% of all deaths.
The death rate from stomach cancer is about 3 per 100,000 people (in the USA). The overall death rate, per https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/79486 https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/79486, is 864 per 100,000, putting stomach cancer at 0.3% of all deaths. In the USA.
Is this actually something we worry about? Most people are infected; virtually no one gets cancer.