Probiotic Yogurt Drinks Reduce Sickness in Kids

WASHINGTONProbiotic yogurt-like drinks help reduce the rate of common sicknesses such as ear infections, sinusitis, the flu and diarrhea in daycare children, according to a new study published online in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The findings also showed no reduction in the number school days missed.

The study, led by Daniel Merenstein, MD, of Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM), and funded by The Dannon Company, Inc., was the largest known probiotic clinical trial to be conducted in the United States. It specifically studied DanActive® and the potential benefits of probiotics such as Lactobacillus casei (L. casei) DN-114 001.

We were interested in a study that resembled how children in the U.S. consume drinks that are stored in home refrigerators and consumed without study personnel observation, Merenstein said. To our knowledge this is the largest probiotic clinical trial conducted in the U.S. and provides much needed data. We studied a functional food, not a medicinal product; parents will thus feed their children without any physician input and we felt it was best to assess [the drink] under similar conditions.

The study, titled DRINK (Decreasing the Rates of Illness in Kids), was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study the gold standard in clinical research design. It included 638 healthy children, aged 3 to 6, who attended school five days a week. Parents were asked to give their child a daily strawberry yogurt-like drink for 90 consecutive days. Some of the drinks were supplemented with the probiotic strain L. casei DN-114 001 (DanActive), while others had no probiotics (placebo). Neither the study coordinators, the children, nor the parents knew which drink was given to which participant until the study ended. In addition to phone interviews with researchers, parents kept daily diaries of their childs health and the number of drinks consumed.

Researchers found a 19-percent decrease of common infections among the children who drank the yogurt-like drink with L. casei DN-114 001 compared to those whose drink did not have the probiotic. More specifically, those who drank DanActive had 24 percent fewer gastrointestinal infections (such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting), and 18 percent fewer upper respiratory tract infections (such as ear infections, sinusitis and strep). However, the reduction in infections did not result in fewer missed school days or activities.