If a patient has a significantly reduced number of parietal cells in their stomach lining, which consequence follows regarding protein digestion?

💡 Explanation

Pepsinogen requires an acidic environment (provided by parietal cells secreting hydrochloric acid) for activation into pepsin, therefore a reduced number of parietal cells will impair protein digestion due to decreased pepsin activation, because there is not enough acid for the zymogen to activate. The answer is decreased pepsin, rather than the other options, because they represent other stages of digestion or other enzyme activity.

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