Intensive Care Unit is the restricted area in the hospital for patients who are in the critical condiotion. Traumatic brain injury is associated with a profound suppression of the patient’s ability to fight infection. At the same time the patient also often suffers hyper-inflammation, due to the brain releasing glucocorticoids in response to the injury. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Critical Care shows that including probiotics with nutrients, supplied via the patient’s feeding tube, increased interferon levels, reduced the number of infections, and even reduced the amount of time patients spent in intensive care.
In a small scale trial, based at North Sichuan Medical College and Hospital in China, 52 patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries, and who were being treated in the intensive care unit (ICU), were either treated as usual or had their nutrition supplemented with probiotics.
Prof Jing-Ci Zhu, the supervisor of this study from the Third Military Medical University School of Nursing in China, explained, “Probiotic treatment appeared to swing the Th1/Th2 balance back towards normality and, in our study, had beneficial effects. Possibly due to the small size of our study there was no significant difference in the number of infections between the groups (9 for the probiotic group, 16 for the control patients).