Long-term effect of early-life supplementation with probiotics on preventing atopic dermatitis: A meta-analysis.

The prevalence of allergic diseases has increased over the past few decades. Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common allergic disease, for which there is currently no known cure. Administration of probiotics in early life may be an effective method to prevent AD, but very little is known about its long-time preventive effect. In this research, a meta-analysis has been conducted to evaluate the long-term effect of early-life supplementation with probiotics on preventing AD. Meta-analysis was performed by the Review Manager version 5.2 software. Risk ratio and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by a fixed effect model. Six trials and a total of 1955 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The combined risk ratio of the meta-analysis comparing probiotics with placebo for investigating the long-term preventive effect of AD was 0.86 (95% CI 0.77-0.96), which demonstrates that probiotics is likely to produce long-term prevention of AD.