SIRS, I apologize to Drs Neal and Logan for the omission of their case control study on Campylobacter enteritis. The study we cited, which studied all types of gastroenteritis and included a larger number of cases and controls, did report an increase in the risk of gastroenteritis with use of proton pump inhibitors. Furthermore, we clearly concluded that proton pump inhibitors have the potential to increase enteric infections. Nevertheless, the study of Neal et al. provides further support for the risk of a specific bacterial enteritis with the use of proton pump inhibitors and it suggests a risk greater than that reported in the study we cited. Therefore, although our article was not a systematic review, their study would have been appropriate to cite as further evidence for the potential role of proton pump inhibitors in enteric infection. I was surprised by the suggestions of Drs Neal and Logan that the ‘relative profiles’ of journals can influence the results of literature searches and that articles in Epidemiology may be less reliable than those in the BMJ. I can assure them that the authors of our article, each responsible for a different portion of the manuscript, did not alter any section in response to requests from the sponsor of the review.
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Loren Laine (2001) studied this question.