“…A number of target genes have been proposed as candidates for the PCR detection of H. pylori, including the 16S rRNA gene, the 26K species-specific antigen gene, the glmM gene, the ureA gene, the ureB gene, the vacA gene, and the cagA gene (see Table S1 in the supplemental material) (7,16,20,26,27,29,32,34,40,43,47,48,55). Although previous reports generally report good sensitivity and/or specificity of the primer pairs used, systematic studies comparing different PCR primer pairs are rare using very well-characterized cases (e.g., negative or positive by multiple tests) (12,45).…”