The aim of this study was to assess the clinical effect of Lactobacillus sakei supplementation in children with atopic dermatitis.

Probiotics were also shown to reduce severity of AEDS when administered to infants with early onset AEDS. In contrast, only a few studies have evaluated the therapeutic effectiveness of probiotics on the groups of older children with established AEDS. In these studies, administration of Lactobacillus strains to unselected children aged 1 year and over was associated with improvement in the clinical severity of eczema. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the clinical efficacy in AEDS of a newly identified probiotic strain, Lactobacillus sakei KCTC 10755BP, which showed the most potent inhibitory activity against S aureus growth among Lactobacillus species in our preliminary experiment. We administered L sakei to an unselected group of children aged 2 to 10 years with moderate and severe AEDS and evaluated the clinical outcome at the end of the intervention. In addition, we also measured levels of serum chemokines as activity markers for AEDS to provide a more objective evidence for the beneficial role of this probiotic.

Inclusion Criteria:

• patients with atopic dermatitis present for at least 6 months before inclusion
• a total SCORAD score above 25
• a change in a total SCORAD score of not more than 10% within 2 weeks

Exclusion Criteria:

• patients who had been treated with cyclosporine, systemic steroid, topical calcineurin inhibitor, or Chinese herbal medicine during the preceding 3 months