Probiotic and synbiotic therapy in critical illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Critical illness is characterized by a loss of commensal flora and an overgrowth of potentially pathogenic bacteria, leading to a high susceptibility to acquired nosocomial infections [1, 2]. Further, sepsis following infection is still a leading cause of death worldwide [3]. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control indicates death rates from critical illness/sepsis have increased at a rate greater than any other common cause of mortality in the last year for which data were available [4]. Thus, therapies to reduce the risk and incidence of infection and sepsis in critical illness are urgently needed.

According to the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, probiotics are living non-pathogenic microorganisms, which have demonstrated well-documented beneficial health effects administered in optimum amounts in the prevention and treatment of several disease states [5]. So far, several mechanisms by which probiotics may exert beneficial effects have been described, including modification of the gut flora by inducing host cell antimicrobial peptides, release of antimicrobial factors, suppression of the immune cell proliferation, stimulation of mucus and IgA production, anti-oxidative activity, inhibition of epithelial cell nuclear factor kappa B activation, and other potentially vital gut epithelial barrier protective effects [6‐8]. As the gut is hypothesized to play a central role in the progression of critical illness, sepsis and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome [9], maintenance of the gut barrier and a healthy gut microbiome, potentially via reintroduction of commensal bacteria (probiotic therapy), may be essential to optimizing outcomes in critically ill patients.

According to current literature, the efficacy of probiotics in the prevention of infectious complications has been extensively evaluated in many animal studies and clinical trials in heterogenous intensive care unit (ICU) patient populations. These studies suggest that probiotics may reduce the incidence of infection, particularly ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) [10], which is a common serious complication in intubated, mechanically ventilated patients [11]. Nonetheless, the effect of probiotics on the prevention of VAP still remains controversial and inconclusive [12‐17]. In fact, its effect depends on the patient population and the probiotic strain studied. Despite the outcome benefits of probiotics therapy, recent guidelines have been unable to make a definitive recommendation for the routine use of probiotics in ICU patients. To date, these guidelines have suggested the use of probiotic therapy in select medical and surgical patient populations in whom trials have documented safety and clinical benefits [18, 19].

Over the last few years, several systematic reviews and meta-analyses have evaluated the effects of probiotics in critically ill patients [12‐17]. In 2012, after aggregating 11 trials that reported on infections [14], we demonstrated that probiotics may reduce infections, including the incidence of VAP, although the effect on VAP was not statistically significant given the available data. Moreover, probiotics were associated with a trend toward reduced ICU mortality, but did not influence hospital mortality. Since our last systematic review and meta-analyses, seven new trials of probiotic therapy have been published [20‐26]. Further, to date, no recent meta-analysis has examined the effect of probiotic versus synbiotic (probiotic and prebiotic fiber) therapy. Finally, a Canadian survey [27] on the use of probiotics as a prophylactic strategy for VAP showed that most Canadian ICU pharmacists have used probiotics at least once, although routine use is considered controversial and considerable practice variability exists. Thus, any increased understanding that the newly published trials can yield will be vital to clarifying clinical probiotic use in the ICU and areas in need of future research focus.

Therefore, as probiotic use in the ICU remains widespread and controversial, current guidelines are not conclusive, and with a significant number of new trials of probiotic use published recently we conducted a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of probiotic and synbiotic use in critically ill patients. Our aim was to elucidate the overall efficacy of probiotics, as a single strategy or in combination with fiber therapy (synbiotics) on relevant clinical outcomes, particularly infection and VAP, in adult critically ill patients.

To date, our systematic review and meta-analysis is the largest and most updated evaluation of the overall effects of probiotics in the critically ill. It is also the first to include an analysis of symbiotic (probiotic/fiber combinations). Based on the analysis of 30 trials enrolling 2972 patients we demonstrated that probiotics are associated with a significant reduction in ICU-acquired infections, including VAP, which is the most common infectious complication in the critically ill. This significant effect on VAP is a new finding from our previous systematic reviews. Further, the beneficial effect of probiotics on reduction of infections is stronger with the publication of the new trials and the data no longer show a statistically significant effect of heterogeneity on this endpoint. Despite the probiotic effect of reducing infectious complications, this therapy did not influence ICU or hospital mortality, although none of the trials were powered to detect an effect on mortality. Overall, there was a tendency towards a reduction in ICU LOS and probiotic therapy did not influence other clinical endpoints such as hospital LOS, and diarrhea. Statistical and clinical heterogeneity was observed for some endpoints, although this was significant for the key endpoints of infectious complications and VAP. In addition, publication bias for overall infections and hospital LOS means that larger, well-powered, and more definitive clinical trials are urgently needed aimed to avoid these biases. Moreover, subgroup analysis showed that those trials with lower methodological quality exhibit the best treatment effect, which is another issue indicating that larger, well-designed studies are needed. Again, with the exception of four trials, most of the included studies (n = 14) that reported mortality had small sample sizes, and hence were underpowered and inadequate to detect any clinically important treatment effects of probiotic therapy on mortality. Moreover, the inferences we can make from our current findings are further weakened, as randomization was concealed in 30 % of trials, whereas double-blinding was performed in 67 % of trials.

Over recent years, several systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been conducted, although our meta-analysis is the largest and most current to date, as it contains the seven new suitable trials published since the most recent comprehensive meta-analysis publication on this topic, which focused on overall infections and other outcomes (not primarily VAP) in 2012 [14]. Further, these previous systematic reviews did not include analysis of synbiotic therapy. Overall, we have examined several relevant clinical outcomes in a heterogenous ICU patient population, and therefore our results could be applied to a broad group of critically ill patients with sepsis, trauma, severe pancreatitis, or who have undergone surgery. Specific to pancreatitis, concerns have been raised about the safety of probiotic therapy following the 2008 trial, Probiotic prophylaxis in patients with predicted severe acute pancreatitis (PROPATRIA) [43], which showed that Ecologic 641® given with fiber post-pyloric was associated with higher mortality and bowel ischemia. This post-pyloric method of administration was associated with an increase in small bowel necrosis, which was subsequently associated with death in a number of patients receiving the prebiotic fiber/probiotic mixture. It is possible that the post-pyloric administration of this fiber/multiple probiotic strain mixture in patients with pancreatitis may carry significant risk and should likely be avoided [52]. Unfortunately, there were significant ethical and statistical concerns raised about the conduct of the trial [53], limiting the utility of the data. Further, more recently, a systematic review and meta-analysis by Gou et al. [54] found that probiotics had neither beneficial nor adverse effects in patients with pancreatitis.

Despite the limitations of the PROPRIATA trial, it has contributed to concerns around the safety of probiotic administration in critical illness and limited the design of larger-scale clinical trials and/or more routine clinical administration of live probiotics. To address this, the American Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) agency reviewed and reported on the safety of probiotic therapy in over 600 published clinical trials and case reports [55]. It should be reassuring to future investigators that the overall conclusion of the extensive AHRQ report indicates that probiotic therapy in both adults and pediatric populations was not been found to be associated with any increased risk of infectious or other adverse events in either healthy or ill patients. Importantly, their report revealed a trend towards less adverse events in probiotic-treated critically ill patients, although isolated adverse effects of probiotic administration have been reported [56]. In any case, careful and appropriate safety monitoring in all future probiotic clinical trials should be conducted.

Recent data indicate that infection during critical illness continues to be a major challenge worldwide. A multi-national ICU study of 14,414 patients in 1265 ICUs from 75 countries, revealed that 51 % of ICU patients were considered infected on the day of survey and 71 % were receiving antibiotics [57]. Of the infections in this study, 64 % were of respiratory origin and the ICU mortality rate in infected patients was more than twice that of non-infected patients (25 % vs. 11 %, P < 0.001), as was the hospital mortality rate (33 % infected vs. 15 % non-infected, P < 0.001) [57].

Currently, VAP is the second most common nosocomial infection in the USA and the most prevalent ICU-acquired infection. Notwithstanding, its incidence is highly variable depending on diagnostic criteria used to identify this infectious complication. In fact, in 2015 Ego et al. [58] reported that the incidence of VAP ranged from 4 % to 42 % when using the six published sets of criteria and from 0 % to 44 % when using the 89 combinations of criteria for hypoxemia, inflammatory response, bronchitis, chest radiography, and microbiologic findings. In our systematic review we found that the incidence of VAP ranged from 9 % [46] to 80 % [39]. Additionally, the apparent effect of probiotics on VAP is largely driven by the studies of Kotzampassi et al. [39] study and the Zeng et al. [26]; both trials explain 45.5 % of the signal and thus, provide an unstable estimate. Moreover, current knowledge shows that VAP is associated with high cost and poor clinical outcomes [59]. In 2002, Rello et al. [60] demonstrated that VAP leads to an additional US$40,000 in hospital charges per patient, and recently it has been suggested that the use of prophylactic probiotics may be cost-effective for prevention of VAP from a hospital perspective [61].

Probiotic therapy may prevent VAP and other infections by restoring non-pathogenic flora, which competes with nosocomial pathogens inhibiting their overgrowth, modulating local and systemic immune response, and improving gut barrier function. However, in spite of these protective effects the role of probiotics as a non-pharmacological strategy in preventing VAP has previously been inconclusive. In 2010, Siempos et al. [12] aggregated five probiotic trials demonstrating a reduction in the incidence of VAP, whereas in 2012 Petrof et al. [14] and subsequently Barraud et al. [13] and Wang et al. [15] did not demonstrate any significant effect of probiotic therapy on VAP. More recently, a Cochrane review of probiotic therapy specifically for VAP [17], found with low quality of evidence that probiotic therapy is associated with a reduction in the incidence of VAP. Our current systematic review demonstrates a significant treatment effect of probiotics in reducing VAP and did not demonstrate statistical heterogeneity, strengthening the signal that this may be an effective therapy for VAP. Recently, a Canadian survey [27] on the use of probiotics as a prophylactic strategy for VAP showed that most Canadian ICU pharmacists have used probiotics at least once, although they do not routinely recommend probiotics for the prevention of VAP.

Currently, a large number of clinical trials have demonstrated that probiotics may reduce the incidence of antibiotic-associated diarrhea and Clostridium difficile infections, and systematic reviews have confirmed a significant signal of benefit on reduction of diarrhea and C. difficile-related colitis in all patients (not confined to ICU patients) [62, 63]. Our results, when focused on ICU patients do not currently demonstrate a treatment benefit of probiotics in preventing and treating diarrhea in the critically ill, including antibiotic-associated diarrhea.

An interesting finding of our meta-analysis was a reduction in antibiotic use in those patients who received probiotics. Nonetheless, only four trials [10, 21, 26, 48] comprising 13 % of included studies reported duration of antibiotic therapy as an outcome. In addition, the study of Zeng et al. contributed to 90 % of the signal, which is a very unstable estimate that weakens our finding. Therefore, probiotics may shorten the duration of antibiotic therapy, although the limited clinical trial data available for this endpoint limits the strength of these findings and further investigation of this effect is needed.

We currently have a greater understanding about the potential benefits of probiotics therapy in critical illness, although much more data are needed. Subgroup analysis found that certain strains such as L. plantarum alone or in combination was associated with a significant reduction in overall infections, although the test for subgroup differences was not significant (P = 0.21). Certain specific biological properties have been described for L. plantarum, including an ability to prevent adhesion of pathogens to the intestinal epithelium secondary to the production of adhesins, enolase, and phosphoglycerate kinase on the bacterial surface [64, 65]. These mechanisms may be crucial to reduction of bacterial translocation and modulation of local inflammatory response, and therefore the effect of this strain on systemic infectious complications. Interestingly, probiotics alone had a greater effect than synbiotics on infections, although the difference between these subgroups was not significant (P = 0.98) and more data on the specific effects of different prebiotic fibers are needed. Finally, future trials also need to focus on evaluating the changes in the microbiome following critical illness and the effect of probiotic or synbiotics on restoring a healthy microbiome in treated patients [66]. Recent advances in microbiome sequencing technology (16 s rRNA) in the last few years have resulted in an unprecedented growth in the amount of sequence data that can be collected at a previously unattainable low cost [66]. Thus, if we speculate that a specific probiotic or synbiotic therapy can be used to treat dysbiosis (a pathological change in the patient’s bacterial flora) and restore a healthy microbiome, we need to evaluate this with the new accessible microbiome analysis techniques currently available. This may help us target probiotic or probiotic mixtures in the future and increase the personalization of care.

The strength of this current systematic review includes the use of several methods to reduce bias (comprehensive literature search, duplicate data abstraction, specific criteria for searching and analysis), and the analysis of relevant clinical outcomes in the critically ill. However, several important limitations in drawing strong treatment inferences are present. These include the significant potential for publication bias for the infection and hospital LOS outcomes, and the small numbers of trials included in subgroup analyses. In addition, the variety of probiotic strains, wide range of daily doses, and length of administration of probiotic therapy among the different trials weaken any possible clinical conclusions and recommendations. We were also unable to perform subgroup analysis for all clinical outcomes due to the limited number of studies evaluating each endpoint.

Based on our current data, there is not currently sufficient evidence to make a final strong recommendation for probiotics to be utilized in the prevention of infections, including VAP, in the critically ill. However, our current guideline recommendations suggest that probiotics should be considered to improve outcome in critically ill patients [19]. Future trials continue to need to address questions about timing, daily dose, and duration of therapy, which still remain unanswered.