Systematic review with meta‐analysis: the efficacy of prebiotics, probiotics, synbiotics and antibiotics in irritable bowel syndrome
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic functional bowel disorder. Disturbances in the gastrointestinal microbiome may be involved in its aetiology. AIM: To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the efficacy of prebiotics, probiotics, synbiotics and antibiotics in IBS. METHODS: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register were searched (up to July 2017). Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) recruiting adults with IBS, comparing prebiotics, probiotics, synbiotics or antibiotics with placebo or no therapy were eligible. Dichotomous symptom data were pooled to obtain a relative risk (RR) of remaining symptomatic after therapy, with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Continuous data were pooled using a standardised mean difference with a 95% CI. RESULTS: The search identified 4017 citations. Data for prebiotics and synbiotics were sparse. Fifty-three RCTs of probiotics, involving 5545 patients, were eligible. Particular combinations of probiotics, or specific species and strains, appeared to have beneficial effects on global IBS symptoms and abdominal pain, but it was not possible to draw definitive conclusions about their efficacy. There were five trials of similar design that used rifaximin in non-constipated IBS patients, which was more effective than placebo (RR of symptoms persisting = 0.84; 95% CI 0.79-0.90). Adverse events were no more common with probiotics or antibiotics. CONCLUSIONS: Which particular combination, species or strains of probiotics are effective for IBS remains, for the most part, unclear. Rifaximin has modest efficacy in improving symptoms in non-constipated IBS.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it