Monday, January 5, 2015

Can Probiotics Keep Gastrointestinal System Healthy?

Tufts University. US: Many advertisements and Internet postings say probiotics are effective for treating asthma, dermatitis and irritable bowel syndrome.

At best, there is marginal evidence that probiotics help these conditions.

Where they have been convincingly shown to be beneficial is in the treatment or prevention of certain kinds of diarrhea and other, less-common illnesses.

Rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea in infants and children. Probiotics will significantly lower the risk of getting the “gastrointestinal flu” because of this virus and other similar organisms. And if a child does get sick, the illness will be less severe if you administer probiotics.


The probiotic most consistently shown to be effective in this situation is Lactobacillus GG , which was developed at Tufts by Sherwood Gorbach and Barry Goldin of the medical school. You can buy it at drugstores under the name Culturelle.

A second instance where probiotics can be useful is with antibiotic-associated diarrhea. When people go on antibiotics, they frequently develop diarrhea. A number of trials have shown two probiotics to be effective for this problem: Lactobacillus GG and a yeast called Saccharomyces boulardii . For people who often go on antibiotics—say a young woman who gets a lot of bladder infections and then gets diarrhea from the antibiotic—it would make sense to take one of these products along with the antibiotic.

In some cases of antibiotic-associated diarrhea, a very nasty bug called Clostridium difficile takes over, because the antibiotics have knocked out the good bacteria in your gut, and this bug fills the void. The only organism that has been shown to convincingly prevent C. difficile is Saccharomyces boulardii .

Other scenarios where probiotics have been shown to be helpful—in people with ulcerative colitis or certain problems that accompany fat malabsorption—are more specialized and applicable to a limited number of people. Many people eat yogurt because it contains probiotics, but studies looking at the potential usefulness of probiotics in a rigorous scientific manner have generally used pure preparations, not yogurt. So whether the helpful bacteria you get by eating yogurt are really as effective as pure probiotics is up in the air right now.

Read more at bit.ly/18dKbKn .