Smoking and Ulcer Healing — Role for Prostaglandins?

Abstract

Cigarette smoking is causally related to duodenal ulcer (DU) and gastric ulcer (GU) disease: there is an increased incidence of DU [1] and GU [2] in patients who are smokers compared with non-smokers; there is a dose-response, in that the greater the number of cigarettes a patient smokes and the longer the history of smoking, the greater the relative risk of developing an ulcer [3]; and cigarette smoking is associated with pathophysiological abnormalities which may predispose to or aggravate duodenal or gastric ulcer disease (Table 1). In addition, cigarette smoking is associated with a slower rate of healing of duodenal and gastric ulcers during treatment with a variety of non-prostaglandin ulcer-healing drugs or placebo [4].