Probiotics may prevent bacterial infection of the blood in mice

Feeding mice a probiotic of harmless bacteria helps forestall harmful microbes entering the humor wherever they could physique up and perchance origin a information called sepsis

Health 24 November 2021

By Carissa Wong

Computer illustration of Bacillus subtilis bacteria

Science Photo Library / Alamy

Consuming a benignant of bacterium that is commonly recovered successful ungraded helps mice debar a humor corruption that could perchance pb to sepsis, and the probe mightiness 1 time pb to treatments for radical too.

Sepsis results from the enactment of bacteria, including Enterococcus faecalis. These microbes tin unrecorded successful the quality gut without causing disease, but successful radical who instrumentality antibiotics for prolonged periods, oregon treatments that weaken their immunity, E. faecalis tin dispersed into the humor wherever it tin origin body-wide infection. This is sepsis.

Now, for the archetypal time, determination is grounds from experiments successful mice that consuming a probiotic tin forestall humor infection. The probiotic was successful the signifier of spores from different benignant of bacterium, Bacillus subtilis. These spores are dormant forms of the bacterium that don’t reproduce themselves and are highly resistant to biology damage. On entering the gut, they activate and grow, influencing the maturation of different bacteria successful the intestine.

Michael Otto astatine the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases successful Maryland and his colleagues archetypal mimicked the attraction that radical with humor crab often receive, by giving mice the chemotherapeutic cause cyclophosphamide for a fewer days and past pursuing this up with a cocktail of antibiotics.

The squad past fed mice with 2 doses of either B. subtilis spores oregon a brackish solution earlier a dose of E. faecalis the pursuing day. The adjacent day, the mice that had received the brackish solution placebo attraction did person E. faecalis successful their blood, wherever it could perchance origin sepsis, but those that had received the probiotic avoided humor infection.

Although neither radical of mice had bacteria successful the humor aft 3 days, astir apt due to the fact that the immune strategy cleared the microbes away, the squad recovered E. faecalis successful the liver and spleen of power mice astatine this stage, but not successful the mice fed with the probiotic.

The squad recovered that E. faecalis produces enzymes that made the gut leakier, helping them dispersed into the blood, and accidental the probiotic could beryllium preventing this effect.

To trial this idea, the radical fed mice with a non-digestible fluorescent chemical, and past measured however overmuch of this marker was contiguous successful the humor 4 hours later. The attraction of the marker was much than doubly arsenic precocious successful mice that had received the placebo arsenic it was successful those that received probiotic. This suggests that the probiotic does counteract an summation successful gut leakiness.

Consistent with this finding, the gut linings of mice treated with the placebo had hugely disorganised structures compared with mice treated with probiotic. The guts of placebo mice wholly lacked villi, finger-like projections successful the gut partition that sorb nutrients from food.

It is important to enactment that this enactment defines circumstantial bacteria that tin forestall sepsis caused by different peculiar taxon of bacterium, says Otto. This marks a favoritism from the claims often made for different probiotics that suggest they person wide wellness benefits but without offering overmuch elaborate knowing of the process, says Otto.

“Addressing sepsis successful a harmless mode has ample nationalist wellness implications, peculiarly these days erstwhile microbial infections person ne'er been truthful dramatically successful the nationalist eye,” says Glenn Gibson astatine the University of Reading, UK.

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abf4692

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• blood
• bacteria
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