Omeprazole and peptic ulcer

NEW YORK, August 3 (Praxis Press) Endoscopic treatments, such as epinephrine injections and thermocoagulation, are widely used to treat bleeding peptic ulcers, but bleeding recurs in 15 to 20% of these patients. To test whether omeprazole would reduce the recurrence of peptic ulcer bleeding, Lau and colleagues randomized 240 patients whose bleeding had been controlled endoscopically to receive either an intravenous infusion of high-dose omeprazole or a placebo for three days after treatment. They found that bleeding recurred in 6.7% of the patients in the omeprazole group as compared with 22.5% in the placebo group. Omeprazole infusion substantially reduced the risk of recurrent bleeding in patients receiving endoscopic treatments for bleeding peptic ulcers.