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Clinical Studies Evaluating Effects of Probiotics on Parameters of Intestinal Barrier Function

The intestinal barrier is important in preventing translocation of bacteria, toxins and antigens from the lumen of the gut into the body. It can be disturbed by various causes, like certain medicines, exercise, mast cell activation, high fat diet, stress, which leads to an increased permeability, allowing amongst others enhanced entrance of lipopolysaccharides (LPS) into the body. Enhanced permeability, or gut leakiness, has been associated with different diseases.

Probiotics are living microorganisms that have beneficial effects on the health of the host. Certain probiotics have shown to be effective in different gut-related diseases. And some research has proven that probiotics have strain-dependent capabilities in vitro as well as in vivo to improve the epithelial barrier function via different mechanisms. In this study, a systematic literature search was performed to find articles addressing the effects of probiotics on the barrier function in human trials.

The systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed up to 1 January 2013, using the following (truncated) keywords “probiotic*, lactobacill* or bifidobact* AND trial AND barrier or permeability”, in order to identify human in vivo studies with probiotic products in which parameters for epithelial barrier function were measured. In total, 29 studies were identified, but patients, bacterial characteristics and methods to measure intestinal barrier function caused large heterogeneity among these studies. About half of the studies showed positive results of probiotics on the epithelial barrier function, indicating a clear potential of probiotics in this field. In a case series of 14 patients using Ecologicâ825, a probiotic food supplement with known effect on epithelial barrier function, different markers of intestinal integrity improved significantly.

Further studies in this field should consider strain(s), dose and duration of the probiotic supplementation as well as the markers used to measure epithelial barrier function. Besides, the lactulose/mannitol test, zonulin and α1-antitrypsin might be valuable markers to measure epithelial barrier function in future experiments.

Article by Saskia van Hemert, et al, from the Netherlands and Germany.

Full access: http://mrw.so/1IyFy9

Image by lactol only, from Flickr-cc.

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