Efficacy of strain-specific postbiotic administration on relief of AD symptoms
All nine studies reported the reduction of AD symptoms. However, only eight were included in the network meta-analysis as one study provided insufficient data to allow pooling. This study reported that SCORAD values were significantly lower at 6 months of treatment using Mix postbiotic preparation (median 11.4 points for Mix, 19.4 points for placebo; p=0.02) but not at 9 months of treatment (median 9.5 points for Mix, 14.8 points for placebo, p=0.08).9
Figure 4a shows the interval plot containing the SMD and 95% CI of each postbiotic strain compared to placebo. LR had the most favorable effect with SMD -0.53 (95% CI of -1.02 to -0.04), indicating statistically significant reduction in symptoms compared to placebo. MV2 had the least favorable effect with SMD= 0.03, indicating possible increase in symptoms. However, MV2, LP1, LP2, LS, MV1, and MV3, have wide CIs which preclude definite conclusions from being made.
The league table, ranking probabilities and SUCRA values are in the Supplementary File. LR was the highest-ranked while MV2 was the lowest-ranked strain for the efficacy outcome.