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Antibiotic Effective in Treating Irritable Bowel Syndrome
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A two-week treatment with an antibiotic can ease overall symptoms in many patients with irritable bowel syndrome for at least 10 weeks and perhaps for much longer, according to a pair of clinical trials of more than 1,200 patients reported Wednesday.
The proportion of patients who benefited--about 11%--was modest, but the fact that any at all were helped validated the idea that intestinal bacteria play a role in the onset of irritable bowel syndrome, commonly known as IBS, said Dr. Mark Pimentel of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who led the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"This is the culmination of a 10-year journey in proving that gut bacteria are a cause of IBS," he said. "There has been a lot of skepticism, a lot of criticism." The drug used in the trials, rifaximin, "has the potential to provide a welcome addition to the limited armamentarium of agents that are available to treat IBS," Dr. Jan Tack of the University of Leuven in Belgium wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.
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