Manufacturers of “healthy yogurts” have long been telling us about the benefits of probiotics and “friendly” bacteria. But new research reveals you can have too much of a good thing … particularly if you happen to be suffering from a severe inflammation of the pancreas.
NutraIngredients reports on a medical trial in the Netherlands that was designed to find out if probiotics could be used to reduce infection rates in intensive care patients with acute pancreatitis, a rare but serious condition. Unfortunately, the results demonstrated that patients who were given the treatment were more than twice as likely to die compared with those who weren’t.
Dr. Marc Besselink told BBC Radio that “nothing went wrong” in the study, it just revealed that probiotics seem to kill patients with certain serious medical conditions. We shudder to think what might happen when a study does go wrong.
The good news is that probiotics are still perfectly safe for the rest of us.
Keith, You may be interested to see what the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics said about this study.
Check out:
http://www.isapp.net/docs/utrecht_response_1-24-08.pdf
I think it a terrible response to the study findings. The response does not detail any rationale about increased mortality, and simply defends probiotics for normal oral use.
While that report argues probiotics may not have played a part in causing the higher mortality rate, I’m more inclined to go with the official report, and Dr Besselink’s comments, which suggest the opposite: “In the probiotics group, 9 patients developed bowel ischaemia (of whom 8 patients died), compared with none in the placebo group.” Obviously it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions because of the relatively small number of patients involved, but it would seem like a pretty big coincidence if the probiotics weren’t involved in some way.