Research in Medicine

Introduction and Objective: Infantile colic is a very common condition in apparently healthy infants with considerable burden on parents and health system. The characteristic of the condition is an excessive, inconsolable crying, which is defined as paroxysms of crying lasting more than 3 hours a day, occurring more than 3 days in any week for 3 weeks in a healthy infant aged 2 weeks to 3 months. Recently, it has been suggested that probiotics may alleviate symptoms of infantile colic, but available data are still conflicting. This study aims to evaluate the effect of a combination of probiotics on infantile colic in comparison with a conventional treatment.

Methods: In a clinical trial study a total of 60 infants with colic were randomized in two equal groups. The first group received a sachet of probiotics per day containing 1 billion CFU of Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus rhamnosus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Bifidobacterium breve, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium infantis, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and fructooligosacharide along with a conventional treatment for two consecutive weeks. The second group received the conventional treatment only. Infant crying frequency, sleep duration, weight gain, number of defecation, change in appetite, and vomiting frequency, carminative use, number of medical advice seeking, and the number of parents’ off-day due to the infant’s condition were statistically compared between the two groups every 2 weeks for 4 weeks using t-test.  

Results: Intragroup analyses showed significant favorable changes in all study variables except for seeking emergency intervention, frequency of defecation and change in appetite after treatments. Intergroup analyses, however, showed similar changes in the outcome variables after two weeks of intervention (p>0.05), except for the number of carminative use, which was significantly lower in the group that received probiotics (11.18±3.73 times vs. 7.03±4.73 times, p<0.001) and no significant side-effects were documented.

Conclusion: Treatment with probiotics is at least as effective as using a conventional therapeutic method for infantile colitis. This probiotic is even superior to the conventional method in terms of decreasing the need for carminative use