Recent Advances in Probiotic Application in Animal Health and Nutrition: A Review

Biotechnological advances in animal health and nutrition continue to play a significant role in the improvement of animal health, growth, and production performance. These biotechnological advancements, especially the use of direct-fed microbials, also termed probiotics, those genetically modified and otherwise, have minimized many challenges facing livestock production around the world. Such advancements result in healthy animals and animal products, such as meat, for a growing population worldwide. Increasing demand for productivity, healthy animals, and consumer food safety concerns, especially those emanating from excessive use of antibiotics or growth promoters, are a driving force for investing in safer alternatives, such as probiotics. The advent of vastly diverse pathogens and bacterial organisms, some of which have acquired antimicrobial resistance due to therapeutic use of these antibiotics, has had a negative impact on the animal and food industries. Probiotics have been chosen as substitutes to counter this excessive use of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Over the last decade, probiotics have gained recognition, increased in importance, and stimulated growing interest in the animal health and nutrition industry. Probiotics are considered to be favorable live microorganisms by the host organism by maintaining microbial homeostasis and healthy gut, and can be a viable alternative to antibiotics in addition to providing other growth-promoting properties. Even though various studies describe the modes of action of probiotics, more research is needed to illuminate the exact mechanism of action of probiotics and how they benefit the host. This review describes the importance of probiotics in animal health, nutrition, and in growth and production performance. It also provides a thorough review of recent advances in probiotics research and application in animal health and nutrition and future directions on probiotic research to enhance animal performance

Recent Advances in Probiotic Application in Animal Health and Nutrition: A Review

Biotechnological advances in animal health and nutrition continue to play a significant role in the improvement of animal health, growth, and production performance. These biotechnological advancements, especially the use of direct-fed microbials, also termed probiotics, those genetically modified and otherwise, have minimized many challenges facing livestock production around the world. Such advancements result in healthy animals and animal products, such as meat, for a growing population worldwide. Increasing demand for productivity, healthy animals, and consumer food safety concerns, especially those emanating from excessive use of antibiotics or growth promoters, are a driving force for investing in safer alternatives, such as probiotics. The advent of vastly diverse pathogens and bacterial organisms, some of which have acquired antimicrobial resistance due to therapeutic use of these antibiotics, has had a negative impact on the animal and food industries. Probiotics have been chosen as substitutes to counter this excessive use of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Over the last decade, probiotics have gained recognition, increased in importance, and stimulated growing interest in the animal health and nutrition industry. Probiotics are considered to be favorable live microorganisms by the host organism by maintaining microbial homeostasis and healthy gut, and can be a viable alternative to antibiotics in addition to providing other growth-promoting properties. Even though various studies describe the modes of action of probiotics, more research is needed to illuminate the exact mechanism of action of probiotics and how they benefit the host. This review describes the importance of probiotics in animal health, nutrition, and in growth and production performance. It also provides a thorough review of recent advances in probiotics research and application in animal health and nutrition and future directions on probiotic research to enhance animal performance

Dosage Individualization of Anti Microbials and Cardiovascular Drugs in Patients with Chronic Renal Dysfunction

BACKGROUND: Chronic kidney disease is a common and progressive illness that may be harmful and may have deleterious effects. Inappropriate dosing in patients with renal dysfunction can cause toxicity or ineffective therapy. Dose adjustment in patients with renal failure reduces both the cost of the drug therapy and the risk of ADRs. OBJECTIVES: 1. To understand the prescribing pattern of antimicrobials and cardiovascular drugs in patients with renal function impairment. 2. To understand drug dosage individualization of all renally excreted antimicrobials and cardiovascular drugs that necessitates dosage adjustment in patients with renal function impairment. DESIGN: Prospective descriptive study. STUDY DURATION: 9 months (from December 2018 to August 2018). SETTING: A 700 bedded multi-specialty tertiary care teaching hospital. PATIENTS: All in patients with estimated serum creatinine value more than 1.7mg/dL (Normal range: 0.8 – 1.2 mg/dL), prescribed with at least one antimicrobial drug or cardiovascular drug or both were included in the study. METHOD: Clinical and demographic details of the eligible patients were collected in a structured proforma after obtaining approval from the Institutional Review Board. Creatinine clearance or estimated glomerular filtration rate of the patient were calculated using Cockroft-Gault equation and Modified Diet in Renal Disease equation respectively with the help of Micromedex calculators. The dose of all drugs with potential nephrotoxicity or renally excreted drugs was evaluated using the published drug dosing guidelines. When necessary the new dosages or dosing intervals were optimized to the patient’s individual degree of renal impairment using relevant equations. RESULTS: 20 patients had moderate renal impairment while 46 had severe and 37 had end stage renal dysfunction. 1016 drugs in 103 patients were evaluated in the present study with an average of 10 drugs per patient. Of these 1016 studied drugs 98 (9.64%) required dose adjustment where 244 (24.01%) were adjusted and 83 (8.16%) were not adjusted. It was found also that most of the drugs requiring dose adjustment were antibiotics (41.77%) followed by antihypertensives (13.67%). Major category of errors identified were overdose (61.53%) and wrong frequency of administration (23.07%). About 15.38% of the drugs were to be avoided strictly. It was also found that 13.12% of prescribed drugs had interaction. The most common interaction was identified as Pantaprazole vs Torsemide and was found in 4.17% of patients. Nephrotoxic drug interactions were observed in 2.79% of patients. Around 1.84% of drugs had narrow therapeutic index. These were prescribed in 13.5% of patients. Prazosin (2%) theophylline (8%) and Digoxin (4%) were the drugs with narrow therapeutic index. CONCLUSION: Recommended dosage guidelines in renally impaired patients were followed in 82.6% of prescriptions whereas only 17.39% were found to be deviated. Findings of the present study revealed that the overall consistency was good when compared with similar studies reported

Interpolation Learning With Minimum Description Length

We prove that the Minimum Description Length learning rule exhibits tempered overfitting. We obtain tempered agnostic finite sample learning guarantees and characterize the asymptotic behavior in the presence of random label noise