Liver cancer is the sixth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world, and third most common cause of death from cancer, according to Cancer Research UK. However, it is true to say the cancer remains relatively rare, with 18,500 new cases in the US every year, and about 3,000 in the UK. Researchers led by Hannu Mykkänen from the University of Kuopio claim a daily supplement of probiotics could reduce the risk of liver cancer caused by fungal toxins in foods.

The research, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Vol. 83, pp. 1199-1203), involved 90 male student volunteers from the Guangdong province where food ingested exposure to aflotoxins is said to be common. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial design was employed with two parallel groups including randomly assigned volunteers to either the control or intervention groups. The intervention involved two probiotic capsules per day containing a mixture of the strains Lactobacillus rhamnosus LC705 and Propionibacterium freudenreichii ssp. shermanii. The control subjects received a cellulose placebo.

The probiotic strains were present in equal weight concentrations with a dose of 2-5 x1010 colony-forming units per day. At the start of the intervention period, both groups had similar urine concentrations of AFB-N7-guanine, a metabolite of aflotoxin M1.

“Probiotic administration led to a statistically significant decrease in the level of urinary excretion of AFB-N7-guanine. The reduction was 36 per cent at week three and 55 per cent at week five, but disappeared during the five-week post-intervention period,” wrote lead author Hani El-Nezami. The reduction in excretion levels of the aflotoxin metabolite indicates that the concentration of carcinogens within the body was decreasing.

“Probiotic-based food products may be an effective dietary prevention that could be implemented in many regions of the world to prevent the development of liver cancer or other environmentally induced cancers,” wrote the researchers. I believe probiotics deserve considerably more attention and welcome research such as this. People would be far better off using probiotics than antibiotics and I encourage anyone who takes antibiotics to follow the course with appropriate probiotics to undo the damage caused by the treatment to their intestinal microflora.