CHANGES IN GASTRIC ACIDITY IN PEPTIC ULCER, CHOLECYSTITIS AND OTHER DISEASES

Abstract

For fifty years the study of gastric acidity in disease has been hampered, first, by the absence of detailed standards of normal for persons of varying age and sex and, second, by a cumbersome method of classifying acidity, a method that tends to obscure any but large differences between two sets of data. We recently published standards of normal based on the records of 3,746 persons. The reader is referred to that paper 1 for many details in regard to technic and other matters. Our standards for free and total acidity and for the incidence of achlorhydria in adults will be found in table 1. So far as children and young persons aged less than 20 years are concerned (table 2), we can provide standards only for free acidity because our data were meager and unsatisfactory in regard to total acidity and the incidence of achlorhydria. In our previous article