A clinician monitoring an infant who was part of the clinical trial.ASIAN INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC HEALTH ARCHIVESA simple synbiotic cocktail—the combination of Lactobacillus plantarum, a probiotic, plus the prebiotic fructooligosaccharide—can help prevent sometimes deadly cases of sepsis and decrease lower respiratory tract infections in newborns, according to the results of a clinical trial published today (August 16) in Nature.
Pinaki Panigrahi, a professor at the University of Nebraska, and his colleagues treated 4,556 full-term newborns in villages in Odisha state in India, where there are high rates of infant death and infectious disease. They found that the synbiotic combination—which costs only $1 per treatment—reduced neonatal sepsis and death by 40 percent, from 9 percent in the placebo arm to 5.4 percent among babies given the experimental treatment.
“This is another report that underscores the importance of gut colonization on the maintenance of optimal immunologic function,” John Marshall, a surgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, who studies sepsis and the immune system in adults at the University of Toronto, and who was also not involved in the work, tells The Scientist. “The [intervention] ...
