Interactive Health Clinic’s Dr Brian Orr describes the recent results of a study about how probiotics might be used to treat Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
Influence Of Probiotics on Multiple Sclerosis
Last February of 2017, I heard an interesting presentation at The Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) forum. It was the results of a pilot study looking into how a probiotic used to treat Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) – an autoimmune condition of the gut – could be used to treat an autoimmune disease affecting the nervous system called Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
Last month, almost a full year later, I was excited to read the results of their complete study.
The results show clearly that, after two months of probiotic administration, the immune systems of the MS patients changed significantly for the better, becoming less aggressive and inflammatory and more peace-keeping and tolerant.
Specifically, the probiotic decreased pro-inflammatory monocytes and autoimmune dendritic cells, as well as chemical markers of autoimmune disease activity. On the flipside, stopping the probiotic induced a rebound in pro-inflammatory monocytes and a loss of healthy anti-autoimmune T-regulatory cells.
Probiotics and Autoimmune Conditions
As many of my patients know, I’m an advocate for the use of probiotics to treat autoimmune conditions. And I usually start with the probiotic used in this study for the very reason that it is the only pharmaceutical probiotic used to treat an autoimmune disease – IBD. There have been some case studies published over the past few years that investigated the off-label use of this IBD probiotic in MS patients, which measured symptom reduction and were generally favorable. But this is the first study of its kind to show how the immune system in MS patients changes in response to probiotics.
You can read the results of the study at Sage Journals.
Multiple Sclerosis Patients in Lynnwood WA
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