Stomach diseases articles from across Nature Portfolio

Helicobacter pylori infection causes chronic gastritis and can lead to severe gastroduodenal pathologies, including peptic ulcer and gastric cancer. This Primer summarizes the epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis and management of this infection, and discusses patient quality of life and open research questions.

Here, Wang et al. use metagenomic sequencing to explore the impact of antibiotic treatment for Helicobacter pylori on the gut virome community in infected patients, showing that recurrent treatment leads to a lower virus community diversity and altered virus-bacteria interactions, compared with treatment naive patients.

The carcinogenic bacterium Helicobacter pylori infects gastric cells. Here, the authors show that H. pylori preferentially infects differentiated cells in the pit region of gastric units, and this relies on bacterial chemotaxis towards host cell-released urea, which scales with host cell size.