Potential Probiotic Therapy in Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Researcher have found from their animal models of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that intestinal microflora is crucial in the development of chronic gut inflammation. Specifically, two groups of genetically modified animals were raised in two different environments: one group was raised in a germ-free environment, and they did not develop intestinal inflammation; the other group was raised in a normal microbial environment, and they did. On another example, when fecal contents in Crohn’s disease patients were reintroduced back once they were healed, inflammation quickly resurfaced. Additionally, IBD patients seem to have abnormal immunologic reactivities to their own bacterial flora, and people without IBD did not develop those.

Those type of studies even showed that certain probiotics bacteria could prevent or minimize intestinal inflammation in some patients. For example, three patients in a pilot study who took oral lactobacillus GG showed significant clinical outcome improvement and possible to be tapered with corticosteroids doses. This finding suggested that an unhealthy interaction between gut and certain gut bacteria contributed to the disease. Overall, those evidence showed an important link between intestinal microbiota in chronic gut inflammation. Probiotics can be pivotal in modulating the host-microbe interactions and provide benefits to patients.

 

Sources

  1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5307257/
  2. A-P Bai and Q Quyang https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563748/#__sec9title