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Health News Archive 109 - Irritable Bowel Syndrome
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Probiotic Normalizes Bowel Movements for IBS Patients

Good news for those with irritable bowel syndrome. A beneficial strain of bacteria called Bifidobacterium infantis has been found to stabilize bowel movement frequency in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) who experience either constipation or diarrhea.

In lab animals with ulcerative colitis, and in humans with IBS, treatment with Bifidobacterium infantis 35624 reverses severe inflammation of the colon and restores the immune balance from a pro-inflammatory state to an anti-inflammatory state. To determine the impact of the probiotic on bowel movement frequency, Dr. EM Quigley, from University Cork College in Ireland, and colleagues assigned 85 female patients with IBS to treatment with the probiotic for 4 weeks and 80 to treatment with a placebo.

For patients with very frequent or very few bowel movements, the bacteria had a significant effect in normalizing the frequency. This appears to be a unique finding since other agents used or tested in IBS have tended to have efficacy in either a diarrhea-predominant group or a constipation-predominant group, but not in both. Changes in bowel frequency were accompanied by very significant improvement in individual symptoms, such as pain and bloating.

Source: Quigley EM. The use of probiotics in functional bowel disease. Gastroenterol Clin North Am. 2005 Sep;34(3):533-45, x.