Should Pediatric Infectious Diseases Physicians be Proponents of Probiotics?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Probiotics are live bacteria or fungi deliberately introduced into the gastrointestinal (GI) tract in an attempt to prevent or treat a disease state. Probiotics are believed to work using three mechanisms (1,2). The first is a direct antimicrobial effect. Probiotic strains are postulated to ‘crowd out’ pathogenic GI flora and to compete with them for elements, such as iron, to act as ‘decoy binding sites’, such that pathogens bind to them rather than to mucosal surfaces and to produce antibacterial products including bacteriocins (bacterial toxins that inhibit other bacteria), hydrogen peroxide and organic acids. The second mechanism is alteration of the GI mucosal barrier. Colonization of probiotic strains may prevent pathogens from damaging the mucosa and invading. The third mechanism is through effects on mucosal immunity, leading to nonspecific humoral immune responses, production of protective cytokines and induction of regulatory T cells, which have an anti-inflammatory effect. Despite decades of use, the efficacy of probiotics for many indications remains unclear. Reasons for this include:
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".