Probiotics and acute gastroenteritis in children – critical review of published evidence

Acute gastroenteritis is a major cause of infant morbidity and mortality worldwide [1]. In developing countries, an estimated overall incidence of acute gastroenteritis ranges from 6 to 12 episodes of diarrhoea per year in children under 5 years of age compared to 1.3 to 2.3 episodes in developed countries [2]. In developing countries, approximately 2.4 to 3.3 million children below 5 years of age die per year from diarrhoeal diseases. In developed countries, death from acute diarrhoea is uncommon but, even in an affluent and industrialized country such as the United States, 300-500 deaths are attributed annually to acute gastroenteritis; the majority of those deaths occur in infants under 12 months of age [2, 3]. The economic burden of acute gastroenteritis is enormous. In the United States alone, gastroenteritis accounts for more than 220,000 hospital admissions per year in children less than 5 years of age (10% of all hospitalizations in this age group), resulting in an estimated direct annual cost of $2 billion [2, 4].