Diagnosis of gastric ulcer in the elderly

It is well known that gastric ulcers are most often found at anglus and upper corpus in the elderly. The number of gastric ulcer found at upper corpus hold half of all cases in the elderly patients with bleeding ulcer. Sixty percent of the elderly patients with bleeding ulcer took NSAIDs including low-dose aspirin in authors' hospital. Now it is easy to treat and cure bleeding ulcers due to development of endoscopic hemostasis and antiulcer drugs such as proton pump inhibitor(PPI). However, the elderly patients sometimes result in fatal outcome on bleeding from gastric ulcer. Therefore, it is important to prevent ulcer complications by PPI for the high-risk group such as elderly patients taking NSAIDs.