A Decade Long Large Scale Clinical Trial
As we have discussed in the previous post, despite all the promising evidences regarding the benefits of probiotic-related products, they are seldom verified in large scale researches. There are good reasons for this disappointing performance. The strains in commercially manufactured probiotics were selected for historical reasons. This is because the process of growing and manufacturing them is easier. The most important is how well strains can colonize our guts when we consume the probiotic-related products.
Bacteria can beneficially tune our immune systems and protect us from disease. It’s just a matter of finding the right strains, and helping them to establish themselves. Many scientists are now trying to do just that. One of them is Dr Panigrahi.
Since 2008, his team has been running a large-scale clinical trial in rural India. This trial is three times bigger than the previous trial alone, and it gave the best statistical evidences of the effectiveness of probiotics. The team gave probiotics that contained a strain of Lactobacillus plantarumprobiotic – chosen for its ability to attach to gut cells, to thousands of randomly selected newborn babies. Their product contained a strain of Lactobacillus plantarum, chosen for its ability to attach to gut cells. The overall combination was highly effective.
The team found that babies who took this concoction had a significantly lower risk of developing sepsis—a life-threatening condition where infections trigger body-wide inflammation, restricted blood flow, and organ failure. Sepsis is one of the biggest killers of newborn babies, ending around 600,000 lives every year when they’ve barely begun. Some proportion of these cases begin in the gut, and probiotics might be able to prevent them by ousting harmful microbes, or by stopping benign ones from crossing into the bloodstream and causing infections.
Highly Promising Trial Results
In this trial, only 5.4% of the infants who took the concoction developed sepsis in their first two months of life, compared to 9 percent of those who received a placebo. This is a huge reduction of nearly 40% with margin of errors.
Other than preventing sepsis, it also reduced the risk of infections of Gram-positives by 82%, and the Gram-negatives by 75%. Risk of pneumonia and airway infections have been visibly reduced too. The result has brought great excitement to the researchers in the probiotic circle.
“It’s a very important study,” says Marie-Claire Arrieta from the University of Calgary. “It not only shows an effective and low-cost way to prevent a horrible infant disease that kills millions worldwide, but provides important clues on how to improve strategies to change the infant-gut microbiome.”
