STATISTICAL EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF HELICOBACTER-PYLORI IN STRESS GASTRITIS - APPLICATIONS OF SPLINES AND BOOTSTRAPPING TO THE LOGISTIC MODEL

Stress gastritis is a serious problem in the intensive care unit popul ation. The recent discovery of the causal nature of Helicobacter pylor i (H. Pylori) in the development of gastric ulcers led us to examine i ts relationship with stress gastritis. We investigated this relationsh ip in 874 veterans admitted to intensive care units who were tested fo r the presence of H. Pylori and followed for 6 weeks for the developme nt of stress gastritis. We fit spline models to assess functional rela tionships and used the logistic model to determine the association bet ween H. pylori and stress gastritis. The predictive ability of the mod el was assessed with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve ana lysis and validated with the bootstrapping technique. Increased anti-H . pylori immunoglobulin A concentrations were found to be an important predictor of stress gastritis independent of other known risk factors . (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Inc.