Introduction: H.pylori is considered as the commonest chronic bacterial infection in man, one half of the world's population has helicobacter pylori infection.
Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate the prevalence of H.pylori in diabetic patients and a possible role of the infection in their metabolic control.
Methods: This case control study included 50 diabetic pediatric patients (age ranged from 4 to 16 years) complained of gastrointestinal symptoms or unexplained anaemia who presented to pediatric clinic at Sayed Galal University Hospital in the period from October 2020 to April 2021 and had been tested for the presence of H.pylori infection by Stool antigen test.
Twenty healthy non diabetic children (age and sex matches) were included as controls together with the 50 diabetic pediatric patients, they were screened for H.pylori by the stool antigen test and accordingly classified into H.pylori positive and H.pylori negative in an attempt to compare the two groups and correlate between H.pylori infection with the age, duration of diabetes, clinical and laboratory findings. Both groups were subjected to complete history taking, clinical examination, and lab investigation.
Results: In the patients group, 63% of patients were males while 36 % were females.
Regarding the Frequency of H.Pylori infection among patients and controls according to stool antigen test, our study showed a total of 30 positive cases out of 50 (60%) in the diabetic patients compared to 9 positive controls out of 20 (45%). There was no significant statistical difference between prevalence of H.pylori infection in cases and controls (p 0.254).
Conclusion: In this study no statistically significant difference was found regarding H.pylori positivity between diabetic cases and controls, as 60% of cases were positive compared to 45% of controls.
Our results showed that H.pylori infection is most frequently detected in individual of low socioeconomic status with insanitary water supplies and overcrowding.