Reged: 12/13/04
Posts: 4490
Loc: West Orange, NJ (IBS-D)
I saw Align mentioned somewhere else recently, so I got curious and decided to do a little research. Here's what I found out.
Align is a commercial probiotic containing "bifidobacterium infantis 35624", brand name "Bifantis". I assume the numeric designator and brand name means this is a proprietary strain of bifidobacterium (not sure how that works if the bacteria is naturally occurring).
The test results are reported to be promising. You can read about them by doing a Search on the Research Library Board for "bifantis" (don't use the quotes). The verbiage indicates that the success rate is as great for Align as it is for Zelnorm and Lotronex. I did not read through the test results on the Align Website, so I do not have the exact improvement numbers for the clinical trials.
I also found some discussion about Align - including comments from people who are taking it - on another IBS Board (here and here ).
Align contains both dairy and soy, although I imagine the amounts of each would be small.
Many probiotics contain bifidobacterium and some even seem to contain b. infantis, so it's not clear to me exactly what the difference is in the 35624 variant. The Align Website does not give information on Colony Forming Units (CFU) which is what other probiotics give on their labels, but one of the IBS Group websites I cite above says that, when asked, the company reports 1 billion CFU per dose.
-------------------- [Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. - Sandra Boynton]
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Align/Bifantis
