PamSmith said...
I have bottle of 60 capsule and expires in Sept. I don't take regularly but should I throw it away? My GI always said not to take it but I did. What should I look for in label that could be worse.
Why did your GI say not to take it? Because of the changes or does he/she not recommend it in general. Also, are you talking about
VSL or visbiome? If it's VSL, have you been taking it since 2016? If so, was it helping? The changes that the lawsuit asserts go back to 2016. So if you've been using VSL since that time, then you may already have a sense of how this version works for you. I only started taking VSL in the summer of 2017 and it's been great for me, though I may just be very susceptible to the placebo effect. Either way, I've found a lot of relief from the post 2016 VSL. My VSL #3DS is being delivered tomorrow and I'm super excited. But as with everything with UC, everyone is different and there is no one thing that is good or bad for everyone.
Also, I'm extremely skeptical of the concerns regarding the changes to VSL (except those pertaining to the addition of things like corn starch or whatever that are on the "no no" list for some individuals). I think there may be legitimate business and PI concerns with VSL that occurred when the partners split, but I think the "health concerns" may just be fear mongering. Additionally, I'm kind of skeptical about
some of the posts that link directly to the visbiome website....
For convenience, here is the full "Expression of Concern" from the PlosOne article that visbiome cites and that I referenced in my previous post:
"Expression of Concern
The primary data supporting the results of this study (1) were not included with the article, and some results for lot 512058 were not reported. The authors have not agreed to share the dataset publicly, and so the article does not comply with PLOS’s Data Availability Policy.
Results reported in the article relied on experiments done using only one lot of “original” VSL#3 and one or two lots (depending on the experiment) of “newfound” VSL#3. Each experiment included only 2 replicates per condition. The authors indicated that the lots used were the only ones commercially available at the time the study was conducted.
Questions were raised post-publication about
the statistical analysis methods reported in the article. The authors re-analysed the data using one-way or two-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Bonferroni tests, and a statistical reviewer advised that there was some redundancy in these analyses (e.g., treating live and dead cell percentages as separate factors in the ANOVA analysis) but that overall the results of the re-analyses supported the article’s conclusions. However, the authors have not agreed to publish the reanalysis files, and without a public dataset, the data analyses cannot be replicated independently.
The Competing Interests section of the article (1) is updated to include the following: Authors Cinque, La Torre, Lombardi, and Cifone were previously paid consultants for VSL Pharmaceuticals.
The authors contest this Competing Interests statement update and have noted that they disagree that the previous consultancies with VSL Pharmaceuticals fall within the scope of interests that must be declared per the journal’s editorial policy.
In light of the lack of compliance with the Data Availability policy, and to notify readers of the other issues noted above, the PLOS ONE Editors issue this Expression of Concern.
7 Feb 2019: The PLOS ONE Editors (2019) Expression of Concern: Production Conditions Affect the In Vitro Anti-Tumoral Effects of a High Concentration Multi-Strain Probiotic Preparation. PLOS ONE 14(2): e0212403. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212403 View expression of concern"