Last Updated: 2008-05-22 13:26:39 -0400 (Reuters Health)
SAN DIEGO (Reuters Health) - In a study at Stanford University, patients who took probiotics after Roux en Y gastric bypass surgery (RNYGB) lost more weight than RNYGB patients who did not.
These findings were presented Tuesday during Digestive Disease Week 2008 by Dr. John M. Morton, during a session on the management of patients with obesity.
"We have better treatments for crack cocaine addiction than we do for obesity," Dr. Morton asserted, "but there has been a real revolution with bariatric surgery. It provides strikingly durable weight loss...As a result, blood pressures will normalize...We have seen diabetes cure rates of 82%, and this can occur within weeks of surgery."
The trial involved 44 patients who underwent endoscopic RNYGB and were randomized to receive either 2.4 billion lactobacilli daily or no probiotic therapy for six months. Quality of life, hydrogen (H2) breath tests, vitamin B12 levels and weight were measured before surgery and at three and six months afterward.
At six months, the probiotic group had lower H2 breath tests, lower fasting insulin, lipoprotein A and triglyceride levels, and higher HDL cholesterol levels compared with controls, although the differences were not statistically significant. There was, however, a significantly greater improvement in quality of life in patients taking probiotics compared to controls.
"What was surprising was that probiotic patients lost more weight after surgery," Dr. Morton told Reuters Health. The study group lost 70% of their excess weight at six months compared with a loss of 66% of excess weight in controls.
He added, "This suggests that the cause of the weight increase may be bacterial...and may help explain the observation that fat people have fat friends...Some of it may be environmental and related to social factors, but it may also be related to high bacteria levels in some way."
"We know that probiotics have to be live cultures and you have to [ingest] a minimum of two billion colonies a day," Dr. Morton said. "We don't know exactly which probiotic organisms are best and how much to recommended...The populations vary. They are different in the gut flora in different patient types."