Menetrier's Disease and Helicobacter pylori

To the Editor: Protein-losing hypertrophic gastropathy is a life-threatening disease characterized by hypoproteinemia,1 often with the development of gastric cancer2. In a retrospective study of 138 patients, we found that hypertrophic gastropathy was associated with Helicobacter pylori in more than 90 percent of cases3. This finding encouraged us to treat a 28-year-old woman for Menetrier's disease associated with protein-losing gastropathy. She had been treated with cimetidine for more than three years, with little benefit, when colonization with H. pylori was detected. H. pylori was also found on examination of biopsy specimens obtained five years earlier, before treatment with . . .