Would you trade an ulcer for stomach cancer?

As an eAlert subscriber, you know I’ve told you a lot about the risks involved in popping those incredibly risky acid blockers known as proton pump inhibitors — ones with familiar-sounding names such as the “Purple Pill” (a.k.a. Nexium), Prilosec, or Prevacid.

And yet millions of Americans are still taking them, despite all the warnings.

While plenty of folks start up on them all on their own (maybe after seeing Larry the Cable Guy pitch Prilosec on TV), the chances are pretty good that, if you have an ulcer, it’s your doctor who insisted you use them.

And according to a new study, those drugs look to be an even bigger risk than the ulcer they’re meant to treat!

After all, having an ulcer is bad enough. But certainly a diagnosis of stomach cancer would be even worse.

And that’s exactly the choice it turns out you’ve got to make when your doc tells you to take one of these acid-blocking meds.

‘Sicker in a variety of ways’
I must be starting to sound like a broken record — but the truth is that it seems like there’s a new finding every month about how those PPI drugs can do you in.

Frighteningly, researchers from Queen Mary Hospital in both London and Hong Kong have uncovered that taking one of the most commonly recommended drugs for ulcer patients can increase your risk of being diagnosed with stomach cancer.

Now, we already know that there’s one thing that’s both a prime suspect for causing ulcers and a risk for stomach cancer — a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).

So, this particular study eliminated H. pylori as a factor, focusing only on patients who were no longer infected with it. But even then, some in the study still developed stomach cancer, while others didn’t.

The only difference between those two groups? Whether they were taking PPIs.

The study found that even when ulcer patients no longer have an H. pylori infection but remain on PPI meds, their risk of stomach cancer keeps going up and up the longer they take them.

Pop them once a week, for example, and that risk doubles. Take them daily, that ups the stomach cancer possibility by four-and-a-half times.

But even that isn’t the end of it.

Use these drugs for over a year, and your risk becomes five times as high. Been on them for three or more years? You’ve upped it by a factor of eight.

I guess the experts had to make some kind of comment. The lame response from a professor who was published in stories about these new findings was that the most “plausible explanation” for this research is that these folks who had ulcers are “sicker in a variety of ways.”

Well, if they weren’t already, they sure will be after taking these meds.

Because where PPI drugs are concerned, prior research has discovered that they can do harm to almost every single part of your body — and that’s true whether you’ve had an ulcer or not.

Just last month, I told you how they can jump-start three devastating kinds of chronic liver disorders, including one that’s reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. — nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD.

Then there’s the link to bone fractures, heart disease, a devastating intestinal infection called C. diff, kidney disease, esophageal cancer, and even dementia!

If you’re currently under treatment with a PPI med due to an ulcer, you need to see your doctor ASAP and tell him that the risk is far too great to continue taking it.

You could switch to another type of acid reducer called “H2 blockers” (also sold OTC), which the UK researchers found were not associated with that rise in stomach cancer.

Yet even without the cancer risk, those drugs present their own dangers — ranging from ringing in the ears, trouble urinating, diarrhea, and insomnia all the way to confusion, agitation, trouble breathing, hallucinations, and an irregular heartbeat.

A better way would be to see if any non-drug treatments could beat back your acid issues. Some proven ways to naturally keep acid discomfort away include taking a quality probiotic daily, cutting down on high-acid foods and beverages, using a wedge to elevate your head at night, and not lying down too soon after eating.

But, as I’ve warned you before, never stop cold turkey if you’ve been taking PPI drugs. You need to lower your dose slowly, or you could suffer worse acid discomfort than you ever have before.

“Acid reflux drug linked to more than doubled risk of stomach cancer – study” Press Association, October 31, 2017, The Guardian, theguardian.com