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
.