Are antibiotics or probiotics helpful treatments for IBS?

Are antibiotics or probiotics helpful treatments for IBS?

Lin Chang (UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases) gives expert video advice on: What are the three sub-types of irritable bowel syndrome?; What are the symptoms of IBS with diarrhea?; How is IBS with diarrhea treated? and more...

In some patients with IBS, if you treat the patients with antibiotics, particularly those who have bacterial overgrowth, which you can detect by a breath test or by other modalities, that those patients will have improvement of their IBS symptoms. We need alot more information, there needs to be other centers to conduct those studies, and we don't know enough about, once you finish that antibiotic treatment, then what? If the symptoms recur then how do you treat them, how long is the efficacy lasting, and who are the patients that do respond to this treatment? Because it doesn't appear that all subjects will improve with that type of treatment. The other related treatment, would be, probiotics, and probiotics are live bacteria. One thought is that there is good and bad bacteria in the gut, and you want to balance it so you have more good bacteria than bad bacteria and probiotics are good bacteria. Now there are thousands of probiotics and they can have all different types of functions. But, the reason why it's being studied in IBS is that some of of these probiotics have actually been used with inflammatory bowel disease with the thought that these probiotics decrease the inflammation in inflammatory bowel disease. Now in IBS, one thought is that some of the patients have microscopic immune activation, or maybe inflammation, but that is a term I am using loosely for that. And that a probiotic will decrease the inflammation or immune reactivity and promote an anti-inflammatory state.