Health benefits of probiotics for the elderly: a review | Semantic Scholar (2024)

A growing number of researches indicates that some probiotic strains may help to maintain the health in old people, suggesting both health and cost-saving benefits in offering fermented dairy products.

This chapter discusses the classical approaches used for strain improvement, such as strain selection, nutritional programming, processing conditions, and the selection of matrices for the delivery of probiotic bacteria to the GIT, and potential future strategies for improvement of probiotics survival.

The volume of research into probiotics has increased in parallel with the search for alternative, natural therapies with fewer side effects and clinical implications, and this is reflected by the development of medicinal probiotics with extensive pre-clinical and clinical research to support their use.

The potentially positive and negative relationships between exposure to stress conditions and probiotic functional properties, such as resistance to gastric acid and bile, adhesion and colonization potential, and tolerance to antibiotics are explored.

Probiotics is a panacea to the Clostridium difficile associated diseases (CDAD) insurgence and is a veritable replacement for antibiotics.

The development of target‐specific probiotic foods, by including strains rationally selected for a specific health benefit, tailor‐made for a certain target population, into nutritionally optimal products constitutes a challenge for the food industry.

The evidence for their use is growing and compelling in certain therapeutic situations, and with the increase in volume and quality of clinical evidence, the use of probiotics should become more widespread in the future.

Lab strains deriving from Nocellara del Belice table olives fermented with the Spanish or Castelvetrano methods are reported, showing high survival rates under in vitro simulated gastro-intestinal conditions, and positive antimicrobial activity against Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, Listeria monocytogenes and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli pathogens.

Adopting the holistic approach suggested by the One Health fighting zoonoses can be even more effective as well as global food production more environmental-friendly and sustainable.

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Although preliminary studies are clearly promising, placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind clinical trials are required to clarify the role of probiotic bacteria in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.

Important changes in intestinal microflora of the elderly have recently been demonstrated and may have important clinical consequences and further studies should be conducted to determine if the consumption of probiotics is associated with a lower infection rate and a higher effectiveness of vaccines.

The approach of modulating the gut flora for improved health has much relevance for the management of those with acute and chronic gut disorders, as well as the elderly, who have an altered microflora, with a decreased number of beneficial microbial species.

The results suggest that consumption of lactitol combined with L. acidophilus NCFM twice daily may improve some markers of the intestinal microbiota composition and mucosal functions.

The faecal microflora in IBS has been shown to be abnormal with higher numbers of facultative organisms and low numbers of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, while the role of probiotics has not been clearly defined.

There now seems to beient evidence of the therapeutic efficacy for this inexpensive and safe treatment modality to be tested more widely, despite several shortcomings in terms of study design and publication details.

It is suggested that probiotic use may be associated with improvement in IBS symptoms compared to placebo, and these results should be interpreted with caution, given the methodological limitations of contributing studies.

The need for more well designed controlled trials with probiotics is explicit, as disruption of the composition of the intestinal microflora following antibiotic treatment is an important prerequisite for overgrowth of C. difficile and the subsequent development of an infection.

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