Benign—Not: Unexpected deaths in probiotics study
By Janet Raloff
Prescribing “good” bugs for the gut—it may sometimes be bad medicine.
That’s what Dutch doctors have concluded after reviewing the findings of a novel treatment in people with acute pancreatitis.
The researchers knew that some of their 296 patients would succumb to infectious complications of an inflamed pancreas, a gland that makes hormones and digestive juices. But they never expected that patients provided nutrition laced with probiotics—supposedly beneficial gut microbes—would experience a death rate nearly triple that of people fed just the nutrients.