Smoking and Ulcers — Time to Quit

Since the turn of the century evidence has been accumulating that peptic ulcer and smoking are strongly associated. Much of this evidence is analyzed in the Surgeon General's 1979 report, Smoking and Health.1 The report concludes that there is an increased frequency of smoking in patients with duodenal and gastric ulcer as compared with controls, that there is a significantly increased (about twofold) prevalence of both duodenal and gastric ulcers in smokers as compared with nonsmokers, that the magnitude of the increased prevalence increases with the number of cigarettes smoked, that smoking retards the healing of gastric and duodenal . . .