The application of probiotics before or during chemotherapy can effectively prevent the occurrence of chemotherapy-induced diarrhea among cancer patients.

PMID: 

Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2019 ;28(4):701-710. PMID: 31826366

Abstract Title: 

Probiotics in preventing and treating chemotherapy-induced diarrhea: a meta-analysis.

Abstract: 

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: To systematically assess the safety and effectiveness of probiotics in preventing and treating chemotherapy-induced diarrhea (CID), so as to provide the evidence-based evidence for clinical practice.METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN: Electronic databases, including EMbase, Cochrane Library, pubMed, CNKI, VIP, CBM, and Wanfang databases, were retrieved to search for the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of CIDs among patients with malignant tumors treated with probiotics as of March 2019. Later, the Rev Man 5.3 statistical software was employed to extract data and assess the quality of the identified literature for metaanalysis.RESULTS: Finally, 13 RCTs involving a total of 1024 patients were included into the current metaanalysis. Results of this meta-analysis showed that the addition of probiotics to conventional symptomatic treatment could evidently reduce the total diarrhea rate in patients with cancer [RR=0.47, 95% CI (0.35, 0.63), p

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