[Arteriosclerosis and gastoduodenal ulcer].

Recent reports suggested an increase in the occurrence of gastroduodenal ulcers in old age people. And it was reported that gastroduodenal ulcers in old age generation has the characteristics which was different from that in young generation. Namiki et al reported that gastric ulcer in old age generation occurs often at the gastric corpus and is larger and deeper and more often with bleeding comparing with that in young people. Furthermore NSAID ulcer is known to occur more often in old age than in young. Although the pathogenesis of the gastroduodenal ulcer in old age is not clear, a decrease in gastric mucosal blood flow with aging might be related that is possibly due to narrowing of arteries based on arteriosclerosis. Since the report by Virchow that suggested the importance of vessels as a cause for gastric ulcer, many studies indicated the involvement of vessels in the pathogenesis of gastroduodenal ulcer. Until recently, however, there were no methods except autopsy to evaluate the severity of arteriosclerosis, therefore the involvement of arteriosclerosis in the pathogenesis was not clarified. Recently a new device that case evaluate the arteriosclerosis by the measuring pulse wave velocity was developed and is now widely used. We undertook to clarify the relation between arteriosclerosis and gastroduodenal ulcer. The result suggested the involvement of arteriosclerosis in the pathogenesis of gastroduodenal ulcer, especially of NSAID ulcer with bleeding. In this manuscript, we refer to the previous reports that suggest the relation between arteriosclerosis and gastroduodenal ulcer.