TY - JOUR T1 - A new 24 h ELISA culture based method for <em>Helicobacter pylori</em> chemosusceptibility JF - Journal of Clinical Pathology JO - J Clin Pathol SP - 648 LP - 651 DO - 10.1136/jcp.2010.076844 VL - 63 IS - 7 AU - Federico Perna AU - Dino Vaira Y1 - 2010/07/01 UR - http://jcp.bmj.com/content/63/7/648.abstract N2 - Background Clarithromycin (CH) and metronidazole (MZ) are routinely used in Helicobacter pylori treatment regimes. Recently, treatment with these antibiotics has been reported to fail in &gt;30% of patients due to increasing resistance. The common chemosusceptibility methods are cumbersome and take up to 14 days. Chemosusceptibility of H pylori is therefore rarely checked.Aim To develop a rapid susceptibility test (RST) for H pylori.Methods Preliminary experiments were performed to find a broth medium able to support the growth of H pylori in 20 h and a reliable detection method to quickly detect the amount of H pylori grown in the media. A mixture of different components was the best broth medium; ELISA was chosen as the detection technique. Performance of the new RST was compared to a gold standard (break point agar dilution method). 200 consecutive patients were tested for H pylori infection and chemosusceptibility to CH and MZ by the gold standard and RST.Results 111 patients were infected with H pylori. 105 of these were positive by both RST and the gold standard culture method; 75/105 and 68/105 strains were susceptible to CH and MZ, respectively. RST misdiagnosed 2 strains of CH and 10 strains of MZ.Conclusions A new simple and rapid chemosusceptibility test for H pylori has been validated, which is simple to perform and reduces the procedure time from 6–14 days to 24 h. ER -