Dr. Marshall

Dr. Barry James Marshall is an Australian physician who is significant for discovering Helicobacter Pylori (H. pylori) as the most common cause of peptic ulcers. Scientists and physicians ridiculed Dr. Marshall for his idea at the time. During the time Dr. Marshall began his work, the scientific community agreed that peptic ulcers were the result of various phenomena such as stress, spicy food and the stomach overproducing acid. Scientists at the time also believed it was impossible for bacteria to survive in the stomach due to acidic conditions. Dr. Marshall is a pioneer in the field of Gastroenterology and he won a Noble Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2005 for discovering the relationship between H. pylori and gastric illness (The Nobel
Over time, other scientists began to accept his findings. Marshall accepted an appointment as a Research Fellow and Professor of Medicine at the University of Virginia in the United States. He taught and carried out his research in Virginia for over a decade, establishing the International Research Foundation for Helicobacter and Intestinal Immunology in Charlottesville, Virginia (Academy of Achievement, 2005). He won the Nobel Prize in 2005 (The Nobel Foundation,
pylori in the context of many diseases. One such study recently completed by Zhou et al. (2016) worked to determine a link between gastritis and gastric cancer. Their methods included collecting information from human subjects. They divided the subjects into two groups; those with early stage gastric cancer and those without cancer. The researchers collected data on H. pylori for each individual in each of the groups. Overall, their finding indicate that “H. pylori infection rate was significantly higher in patients with moderate-to-severe early gastric cancer (75.0% vs 54.1%, P = 0.001)” (p.3671).

Another study completed by Yao et al. (2016) explored a possible role for H. pylori infection in multiple sclerosis. The researchers completed a meta-analysis by combining and comparing previously published research. Based on nine different studies, they found that MS patients had lower rates of H. pylori infection than controls groups (Yao et al. 2016). They also examined MS and H. pylori infection by region and findings showed a difference. MS patients had lower infection rates than control subjects in Western countries; these findings were not statistically significant in Eastern countries (Yao et al.