Ranitidine maintenance therapy in the prevention of duodenal ulceration; a comparison of 150 mg at night with 300 mg at night.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to investigate if the use of a higher night time dose of ranitidine (300 mg) could keep significantly more duodenal ulcer patients in remission than the usual maintenance dose (150 mg). METHODS: Double-blind, multi-centre, parallel group study of patients with proven healed duodenal ulcer randomized to ranitidine 150 mg or 300 mg daily for 1 year. The primary study end-point was symptomatic, endoscopically proven ulcer relapse. RESULTS: A total of 489 patients were recruited into the study. The endoscopically proven relapse rates were 6.1% of ranitidine 150 mg daily (n = 250) and 6.9% on 300 mg daily (n = 239). These differences were not statistically significant. CONCLUSION: This study provides further evidence that maintenance therapy with ranitidine 150 mg daily is highly effective at preventing duodenal ulcer relapse. The use of the higher dose of 300 mg daily does not appear to keep significantly more patients in remission.

Dyspepsia: incidence of a non-ulcer disease in a controlled trial of ranitidine in general practice.

Patients who presented to their family doctors with previously uninvestigated dyspepsia of at least two weeks' duration were recruited into a placebo controlled trial of treatment with ranitidine (150 mg twice daily) for six weeks. All patients were examined by endoscopy before treatment, and for those with macroscopical abnormalities the examination was repeated after treatment. Of the 604 patients recruited, 559 had endoscopy, of whom 171 (30%) had no apparent abnormality. Of the 388 patients remaining, one third had two or more lesions. The high incidence of underlying disease was coupled with low accuracy in unaided clinical diagnosis. After endoscopy 496 patients with persistent symptoms (median duration six to eight weeks) were randomly allocated to treatment and then reviewed every two weeks. Complete remission of symptoms occurred in 76% of patients who were taking ranitidine and in 55% who were taking placebo (p less than 0.000004). Of those with non-ulcer dyspepsia, significantly more became symptom free taking ranitidine compared with placebo (p less than 0.002). Ranitidine healed most duodenal ulcers (80%) and gastric ulcers (90%) within four weeks. Tolerance to ranitidine was good, and the incidence of complaints was similar on placebo.