Source: Thailand Medical News Jan 15, 2020 4 years, 10 months, 1 week, 11 hours, 19 minutes ago
The general public should be wary of searching for
probiotics information online as most webpages originate from unreliable sources and the health-benefit claims are often not supported by robust scientific evidence.
In a new study, published in
Frontiers in Medicine, cautions that while Google is adept at sorting the most reliable websites to the top of the list, the majority of websites providing information on probiotics are from commercial sources.
Study author Professor Dr Pietro Ghezzi, from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK told
Thailand Medical News, "Most webpages with information on
probiotics are from commercial sources or
news outlets but these provide the least complete information, in terms of not discussing potential side effects or regulatory issues. We also find many websites allude to benefits of
probiotics in diseases for which there is not much high-level scientific evidence, other than in mice."
Typically,
probiotics are live organisms that, if research holds its promise, could be beneficial to health. There is a large US market for
probiotics but less so in the EU, likely due to stricter regulation for health claims. Nevertheless, the market for
probiotics continuously expands with the globalization of
online sales.
Concerned that the public has unrealistic expectations about the beneficial effects of
probiotics (bolstered by online claims and hype in the news), Dr Ghezzi and his colleagues decided to assess the information that the public were exposed to when searching
online.
Co-author Dr Michel Goldman, a Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in healthcare, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium explained, "We assessed the first 150 webpages brought up by a Google search for "
probiotics", recorded where they originated from and the diseases they mentioned. The scientific evidence for health benefits of
probiotics against these diseases were then examined for scientific rigor.”
The team used the Cochrane library, a database of clinical trials and meta-analyses of evidence-based medicine to assess the strength of scientific evidence found
online.
Dr Goldman adds, "We also looked at how Google ranked these websites, as often the public will not go past the first ten results as these will therefore have a higher visibility and impact."
It was observed that news-outlets and comm
ercial sources made up the majority of the 150 webpages and the analysis showed these were the least reliable, often not mentioning the side effects on immunocompromised individuals nor any regulatory issues. In addition, the findings of experiments on mice were used to make claims about
probiotic benefits against disease in humans.
However it's not all bad news. Dr Ghezzi explains that Google has developed very stringent criteria for ranking health-related websites, however, we should always question where the information originates from.
Dr Ghezzi added, "Google prioritizes webpages containing more complete and scientifically robust information about
probiotics, particularly health portals, and these are given a higher ranking than commercial websites. However, the fact that there is such a large amount of commercially-oriented information is problematic for consumers who are searching for honest answers."
Reference : Marie Neunez et al, Online Information on Probiotics: Does It Match Scientific Evidence?,
Frontiers in Medicine (2020).
DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2019.00296
