ArticleNutrition journal2015
A review of the systematic review process and its applicability for use in evaluating evidence for health claims on probiotic foods in the European Union.
Article in Nutrition journal, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Effectiveness of Psychobiotics in the Treatment of Psychiatric and Cognitive Disorders: A Systematic Review of Randomized Clinical Trials.Nutrients · 2024Pooled it
- Probiotics for treating acute infectious diarrhoea.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2020Pooled it
- Choosing an appropriate probiotic product for your patient: An evidence-based practical guide.PloS one · 2018Pooled it
- Symbiotic in Alzheimer's disease: modulating the gut-brain axis for neuroimmune homeostasis and cognitive protection.Inflammopharmacology · 2026Review
- Is There Evidence to Support Probiotic Use for Healthy People?Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- Knowledge of Dietitians on Gut Microbiota in Health-An Online Survey of the European Federation of the Associations of Dietitians (EFAD).Nutrients · 2024Article
- Probiotics for the Prevention of Antibiotic-Associated Diarrhea.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Review
- Consumers' Trade-Off between Nutrition and Health Claims under Regulation 1924/2006: Insights from a Choice Experiment Analysis.Nutrients · 2019Article
- Genome editing of lactic acid bacteria: opportunities for food, feed, pharma and biotech.FEMS microbiology letters · 2019Review
- Strain-Specificity and Disease-Specificity of Probiotic Efficacy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in medicine · 2018Article
- Article
- Bifidobacteria and Butyrate-Producing Colon Bacteria: Importance and Strategies for Their Stimulation in the Human Gut.Frontiers in microbiology · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper addresses the use of systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the strength of evidence for health benefits of probiotic foods, especially relating to health claim substantiation in the European Union. A systematic review is a protocol-driven, transparent and replicable approach, widely accepted in a number of scientific fields, and used by many policy-setting organizations to evaluate the strength of evidence to answer a focused research question. Many systematic reviews have been published on the broad category of probiotics for many different outcomes. Some of these reviews have been criticized for including poor quality studies, pooling heterogeneous study results, and not considering publication bias. Well-designed and -conducted systematic reviews should address such issues. Systematic reviews of probiotics have an additional challenge - rarely addressed in published reviews - in that there must be a scientifically sound basis for combining evidence on different strains, species or genera. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is increasingly adopting the systematic review methodology. It remains to be seen how health claims supported by systematic reviews are evaluated within the EFSA approval process. The EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies deems randomized trials to be the best approach to generating evidence about the effects of foods on health outcomes. They also acknowledge that systematic reviews (with or without meta-analyses) are the best approach to assess the totality of the evidence. It is reasonable to use these well-established methods to assess objectively the strength of evidence for a probiotic health claim. Use of the methods to combine results on more than a single strain or defined blend of strains will require a rationale that the different probiotics are substantively similar, either in identity or in their mode of action.
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.