She knew she wasn’t feeling perfectly fit, but Sonali Kocchar, 36, a Delhi-based physician with an NGO, didn’t think it was serious enough to complain about. Kocchar ignored the mild pain in her chest, the occasional heartburn after a meal, and focused on work instead. She often worked late and never kept track of the cups of coffee she had. She travelled frequently, all over the world.
Kocchar should have known better, in retrospect. With time, the pain grew more and more acute. She started feeling nauseous, and when it started keeping her awake at night, she knew it was serious enough to get herself checked up.
It was, as she suspected, a peptic ulcer—a sore in the lining of the stomach or intestine —one of the most common and uncomfortable health problems anywhere. Though exact figures for India are not available, according to the US National Institutes of Health, it affects one in 10 Americans. In the UK, up to 13% of men, and 5% of women, get such ulcers. In a globalized world, where jetting around the world, eating and drinking at odd hours, and stress, have become a part of everyday life, symptoms of ulcers are getting increasingly common.
“Indeed, factors such as stress or tea and coffee, are triggers. They make the situation worse,” says S. Chatterjee, an internal medicine specialist at Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. He explains: “Every time we eat, our stomach produces acids to digest this food. Normally, a mucous coating on our stomach protects it against these acids. But, in certain situations, this protection is stripped off and acids affect the stomach, lining resulting in painful ulcers.”
Cause and effect
Lifestyle factors can aggravate the problem, but do not actually cause ulcers. Having tea or coffee frequently is more likely to cause acid reflux, where the food, along with the stomach acids, gets regurgitated up the oesophagus (the tube that connects the mouth to the stomach), says Paramvir Singh, a consultant gastroenterologist at Artemis Health Institute, Gurgaon. Among the known offenders are common drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen, called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which have been known to strip the stomach of its mucous coating and cause ulcers; so can excessive alcohol consumption and smoking. What took the medical profession by storm, however, was the discovery in the 1980s that a spiral-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori that settles in the stomach, is more often the culprit. It weakens the mucous coating, and along with the acid, irritates the stomach lining till a sore forms. Nobody knows how it acts and why. Being infected with this bacteria does not necessarily mean you will get an ulcer. It only increases your chances of getting it. Nobody is quite sure how it is transmitted, although it is thought to be through food and water.
Blame it on bacteria