The Gut Microbiome and Parasites

Table of Contents

1. What the Presentation Said
2. What the Gut Microbiome Is and How It Is Measured
3. What Worm Infections Do to Gut Bacteria
4. What Happens to the Microbiome After Deworming
5. Blastocystis: A Parasite Linked to Higher Diversity
6. Probiotics Given Alongside Antiparasitic Medicines
7. Do Probiotics Speed Recovery of the Microbiome?
8. Probiotic Safety in People With Cancer
9. What Stool Microbiome Tests Can and Cannot Tell
10. How the Claim Compares With the Research
11. What Is Not Known
12. Connections
13. Key Research Papers
14. Featured Videos

What the Presentation Said

The speaker described parasite cleansing as a process with four stages: an activation phase, a detox phase, a rebalancing phase and a final phase of optimisation. In that last phase, after the cleanse and the detox, the gut flora — the gut microbiome — is to be restored and optimised.

Several further points about the microbiome were made:

• Parasites were said to thrive when the body's detoxification pathways are sluggish and the microbiome is out of balance.
• “Repairing the microbiome” was listed as part of improving the body's “terrain”, together with liver support and detoxification.
• The speaker described probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics as important for preparing the gut microbiome.
• In the speaker's experience, an analysis of the microbiome was also described as necessary. The speaker named several commercial stool tests by brand; this page refers to them only as commercial stool microbiome tests.
• In the question period, the speaker described a commercial stool panel as looking for parasites, for gut dysbiosis (an imbalance of gut microbes), for fermentation and for “leaky gut syndrome”, and linked the microbiome to the gut-brain connection.

The presentation did not cite a study for these points, and it did not name any particular probiotic strain, such as the yeast Saccharomyces boulardii, or any particular parasite in connection with the microbiome. This page therefore tests the general claim against the research that exists: studies of worm infections and the microbiome, studies of what happens after deworming, the one common gut parasite that is linked to a more diverse microbiome, the randomised trials of a probiotic yeast given with antiparasitic medicines, and the published assessments of microbiome testing.

What the Gut Microbiome Is and How It Is Measured

The large intestine holds trillions of microbes from hundreds of species. Most of them are bacteria, but the community also includes yeasts, viruses and single-celled organisms called protists. Some intestinal parasites are themselves protists (Giardia, Entamoeba, Blastocystis); others are worms, called helminths (roundworm, whipworm, hookworm, tapeworm).

Researchers describe a microbiome in a few standard ways:

• Diversity — how many different kinds of microbes are present and how evenly they are spread. A single diversity figure is a description, not a diagnosis.
• Composition — which groups of bacteria dominate (for example Bacteroides, Prevotella, Clostridiales or Bifidobacterium).
• Function — which genes the microbes carry and what they can make or break down.

Almost every study on this page measured the microbiome from stool, by reading bacterial genes directly from the sample. One method reads a single marker gene that all bacteria share; the more detailed method, called shotgun metagenomics, reads all the genetic material in the sample. Both methods describe what was in one stool sample on one day; both can be affected by how the sample was collected, stored and processed (see What Stool Microbiome Tests Can and Cannot Tell).

What Worm Infections Do to Gut Bacteria

Large studies in places where intestinal worms are common show that worm infection is one of the strongest factors linked to the make-up of the gut microbiome — but the direction of the change is often the opposite of what the phrase “imbalanced microbiome” suggests.

Africa

• In 575 people from Cameroon who followed hunter-gatherer, farming or herding ways of life, lifestyle and country were the factors most strongly linked to microbiome make-up. After those, the next strongest factor was the presence of gut parasites. More parasites went with higher microbial diversity, the microbiome pattern alone predicted infection with the four common soil-transmitted worms with 80% accuracy, and infection was also linked to higher levels of inflammatory immune signals in the blood (Rubel and colleagues, 2020).
• In 310 stool samples from mothers and children in rural and semi-urban Gabon, the number of worm species a person carried was linked to microbiome diversity and composition, most strongly in rural children. When the same method was applied to five more published African groups, the links between parasites and particular bacteria differed from place to place, with a “modest but reproducible” link between infection and microbiome diversity (Ngwese and colleagues, 2025).
• Not every worm pushes in the same direction. In 138 Ethiopian school children, those infected with whipworm (Trichuris trichiura) had lower microbial diversity than uninfected children, and a different overall bacterial make-up (Taye and colleagues, 2024).

Asia

• In 650 stool samples from indigenous Malaysians in five villages, people from villages with more worm infection had greater microbial diversity. But the village a person lived in was the strongest single factor, and the effect of worm infection on the microbiome differed from village to village; the authors describe the effect as “highly dependent on context” (Tee and colleagues, 2022).
• In China, 87 people with tapeworm infection (Taenia asiatica, a tapeworm species found in Asia) were compared with 79 uninfected people. The infected group had higher diversity, more Prevotella-dominated microbiomes, and markedly fewer Bifidobacterium — a group of bacteria often regarded as beneficial (Mu and colleagues, 2024).

Which way does the influence run?

A 2024 review describes the relationship as two-way: intestinal parasites change the composition and diversity of gut microbes, and the resident microbes in turn influence whether a parasite survives, settles in and is expelled. The review draws on both clinical studies and experimental animal models (Grondin and colleagues, 2024). So the speaker's idea that the state of the microbiome affects parasites has support in laboratory research; but the human studies above describe worm infection going with a more diverse microbiome more often than with a depleted one, with whipworm an exception.

What Happens to the Microbiome After Deworming

If parasites damage the microbiome, removing them might be expected to return it to the pattern seen in uninfected people. The studies that followed the same people before and after treatment do not show that.

• Indonesia and Liberia. Stool samples taken during a double-blind randomised deworming trial showed that the gut bacteria changed after treatment, but did not move closer to the pattern of uninfected people. People who cleared the infection on their own had more similar microbiomes to one another than people who stayed infected (Rosa and colleagues, 2018).
• Malaysia. The worm medicine albendazole changed the microbiome both in infected people and in people who had no worms at all. The authors note that the medicine's own effect on gut bacteria “can be confounding” when deworming studies are interpreted (Tee and colleagues, 2022).
• An earlier study. People from regions where worms are common carried a microbiome rich in Clostridiales bacteria; after deworming, Clostridiales fell and Bacteroidales rose. In mice carrying a gene variant linked to Crohn's disease, worm infection protected the gut by keeping out an inflammatory Bacteroides species (Ramanan and colleagues, 2016). The human finding is a change in bacterial groups, not a measured health outcome.
• China. In 24 people treated for tapeworm, how stable the microbiome stayed after deworming varied widely from person to person, and the depleted Bifidobacterium did not recover after the tapeworm was removed (Mu and colleagues, 2024).

Taken together, these studies show that deworming does change the gut microbiome, that the antiparasitic drug itself is part of the change, and that the result differs between people and places. None of them tested whether adding probiotics, prebiotics or postbiotics after deworming changes that outcome. The idea of using worms themselves as a treatment for immune diseases is covered on the sibling page How Parasites Evade the Immune System.

Blastocystis: A Parasite Linked to Higher Diversity

Blastocystis is a single-celled organism and the most common protist found in the human gut. It has long been listed among intestinal parasites, and whether it causes disease is still debated. It is the clearest example of a “parasite” whose presence goes with a microbiome usually described as healthy.

• In a study of 296 healthy children in Mali, the 147 children carrying Blastocystis (detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a genetic test) had a more diverse gut microbiome than the 149 who did not. They also had more Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, a bacterium associated with an anti-inflammatory gut, and Blastocystis was not linked to potentially harmful bacteria (Kodio and colleagues, 2019).
• In 1,098 adults in a large diet-and-microbiome study, Blastocystis was one of the microbes that marked more favourable blood-sugar responses after meals (Asnicar and colleagues, 2021). This is an association in a nutrition cohort, not evidence that Blastocystis causes better blood sugar.
• A 2024 review states that the organism is “increasingly being viewed as a commensal member of the gut microbiome” (commensal means living in the gut without harming the host), and that in healthy people it is frequently associated with higher bacterial diversity. The review adds that it is not possible to tell whether Blastocystis creates a healthy gut or simply settles more easily in one (Aykur and colleagues, 2024).
• Blastocystis comes in genetic subtypes, and they may not behave alike. In patients with diarrhoea in Singapore, those carrying subtype 7 had lower bacterial diversity and more Escherichia-Shigella bacteria than patients without Blastocystis; the authors regard subtype 7 as a disease-causing subtype (Deng and colleagues, 2022).

These findings bear on the speaker's framing. A stool test that reports Blastocystis as a “parasite” is reporting an organism that, in healthy people, is more often found alongside a diverse microbiome than a damaged one. More on the organism: Blastocystis.

Probiotics Given Alongside Antiparasitic Medicines

The presentation spoke of probiotics in general. The probiotic most studied with antiparasitic treatment is Saccharomyces boulardii, a yeast. Its trials were small, from Turkey and Iran, and tested it alongside — or in one trial instead of — metronidazole, a standard medicine for protozoan gut infections. Where the dose was reported, it was given at 250 milligrams two or three times a day.

Giardia

• In a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 65 adults with giardiasis, all treated with metronidazole for 10 days, Giardia cysts were still found in the stool of 6 of the 35 people (17.1%) who also took placebo capsules at two and four weeks, and in none of the 30 who also took Saccharomyces boulardii (Besirbellioglu and colleagues, 2006).

Entamoeba histolytica (amoebic dysentery)

• In a double-blind randomised trial of 54 adults with acute amoebiasis, all treated with metronidazole and iodoquinol, diarrhoea lasted about 12 hours in the group that also took Saccharomyces boulardii against about 48 hours in the group that did not; fever and abdominal pain were also shorter. At four weeks, amoebic cysts were found in 5 of 27 people (18.5%) without the yeast and in none with it (Mansour-Ghanaei and colleagues, 2003).
• In an open-label randomised trial of 50 children with bloody diarrhoea from amoebiasis, bloody diarrhoea lasted about 42 hours with Saccharomyces boulardii added to metronidazole, against about 72 hours with metronidazole alone; by day 10 all children in both groups had recovered and their cysts had cleared (Dinleyici and colleagues, 2009).
• A null result: in a randomised trial of 85 children with amoebiasis-associated diarrhoea, adding Saccharomyces boulardii to metronidazole did not shorten diarrhoea (median 4.5 days against 5 days) or change any other measured symptom. The yeast was well tolerated, with no side effects recorded (Savaş-Erdeve and colleagues, 2009).

Blastocystis

• In 48 children with digestive symptoms for more than two weeks and Blastocystis in the stool, assigned in turn to Saccharomyces boulardii, metronidazole or no treatment, symptoms had resolved at day 15 in 77.7% of the yeast group, 66.6% of the metronidazole group and 40% of the untreated group. At one month, the organism had cleared in 94.4% with the yeast and 93.3% with metronidazole (Dinleyici and colleagues, 2011). Groups were small (15 to 18 children), allocation was by alternation, and 40% of untreated children also improved.

What these trials measured was symptom duration and cyst clearance. None of them measured the gut microbiome, none took place after a “cleanse”, and none involved people with cancer.

Do Probiotics Speed Recovery of the Microbiome?

The speaker's plan places probiotics after antiparasitic treatment, to restore the gut flora. The most direct test of a similar idea comes from research on antibiotics rather than antiparasitic medicines.

In a 2018 study in mice and in human volunteers, people took a course of antibiotics and then either a multi-strain probiotic, nothing, or a transplant of their own stool collected before the antibiotics (an autologous fecal microbiota transplant). Compared with recovering on their own, the probiotic group showed a “markedly delayed and persistently incomplete” return of the original stool and gut-lining microbiome; the own-stool transplant brought a near-complete recovery within days. In laboratory tests, substances released by Lactobacillus bacteria contributed to holding back the native microbes (Suez and colleagues, 2018).

This study concerned antibiotics, not worm medicines. It does show that the assumption that a probiotic “repairs” a disturbed microbiome has been tested in at least one setting and was not confirmed there. No comparable study after antiparasitic treatment was found.

Probiotic Safety in People With Cancer

Probiotics contain live organisms. For most healthy people this is not a problem, but the published research raises a concern for people whose immune systems are weakened — a group that includes many people receiving cancer treatment.

• In an intensive care unit in Spain, three patients developed bloodstream yeast infection (fungaemia) while receiving a Saccharomyces boulardii probiotic through a feeding tube. The yeast in their blood and the yeast in the capsules had identical genetic fingerprints, and the outbreak stopped when the unit stopped using the product. The authors also reviewed 57 further published cases; across these cases, 60% of patients were in intensive care, 71% were receiving tube or intravenous feeding, probiotic use was documented in 26, and 17 deaths were recorded among the cases reviewed (Muñoz and colleagues, 2005).
• A systematic review and meta-analysis of probiotics in people with cancer pooled 21 randomised trials (2,982 participants) for benefit and 25 studies (2,242 participants) for safety. Probiotics may reduce the odds of diarrhoea (odds ratio 0.52, meaning roughly half the odds), but the authors concluded there are “insufficient studies to assess the true effect”. Five case reports described probiotic-related bloodstream infections, and adverse events were reported inconsistently across trials (Hassan and colleagues, 2018).

Decisions about probiotics and antiparasitic medicines during cancer treatment belong with a clinician.

What Stool Microbiome Tests Can and Cannot Tell

The speaker described microbiome analysis as necessary. The research describes two separate problems with that idea: whether the measurement is reproducible, and whether the result changes care.

Reproducibility

In a quality-control project, the same set of stool and artificial samples was sequenced by 15 laboratories and analysed with nine different computer pipelines. The results varied, most of all with the type and origin of the sample, then with the method used to extract genetic material, the handling of the sample, and the computer analysis (Sinha and colleagues, 2017). Two laboratories can therefore report different microbiome profiles from the same person.

Clinical usefulness

In 2025 an international panel of microbiome scientists and gastroenterologists published a consensus statement on microbiome testing in clinical practice. It states that evidence supporting the clinical usefulness of gut microbiome testing “is scarce”, and that a growing number of commercial providers sell direct-to-consumer microbiome tests “without any consensus on their regulation or any proven value in clinical practice”, which the panel says could waste individual and health-care resources and cause drawbacks in patient management. The panel set out minimum standards for providing and reporting microbiome tests (Porcari and colleagues, 2025).

A commercial stool panel can combine two different things: tests for specific disease-causing organisms (such as Giardia), which are established diagnostics, and a broader microbiome or “dysbiosis” profile, which is the part the consensus panel describes as lacking proven clinical value. No published study was found that tested whether microbiome profiling before or after antiparasitic treatment changes outcomes. How stool tests for parasites themselves perform is covered on the sibling page Stool Tests for Parasites and Their Limits.

How the Claim Compares With the Research

Supported

• Intestinal parasites and gut microbes do influence each other. Large human studies in Africa and Asia find that worm infection is one of the strongest factors linked to microbiome make-up (Rubel and colleagues, 2020; Tee and colleagues, 2022).
• Antiparasitic treatment changes the gut microbiome. Studies before and after deworming report measurable shifts, partly caused by the medicine itself (Rosa and colleagues, 2018; Tee and colleagues, 2022).

Supported only in part

• That parasites thrive in an imbalanced microbiome: research in people and in animal models shows that resident microbes affect whether parasites survive and are expelled (Grondin and colleagues, 2024). But in people, worm infection and the common protist Blastocystis are more often found with a more diverse microbiome, not a depleted one, with whipworm and Blastocystis subtype 7 as exceptions (Taye and colleagues, 2024; Deng and colleagues, 2022).
• That probiotics help: small randomised trials report that the yeast Saccharomyces boulardii, added to metronidazole, shortened symptoms or cleared cysts faster in giardiasis and amoebiasis, while one trial in children found no benefit (Savaş-Erdeve and colleagues, 2009). These trials did not measure the microbiome.

Not supported by the research found

• That a probiotic restores the microbiome after a disturbance: in the one direct test, after antibiotics, a multi-strain probiotic delayed recovery of the native microbiome (Suez and colleagues, 2018).
• That microbiome analysis is necessary: an international consensus panel states that evidence for the clinical usefulness of microbiome testing is scarce and that direct-to-consumer tests lack proven value in clinical practice (Porcari and colleagues, 2025).

No research found

• No trial was found of a four-phase parasite cleanse followed by microbiome “optimisation”.
• A PubMed search on 2026-10-23 found no randomised trial of prebiotics or postbiotics given after antiparasitic treatment, and none of probiotics given with albendazole or other worm medicines in people.
• No study was found that tested microbiome repair after antiparasitic treatment in people with cancer.

What Is Not Known

• Whether the microbiome changes that come with worm infection are harmful, harmless or in some ways protective. Higher diversity in infected people does not prove that the infection is good for them; the Cameroon study also found raised inflammatory signals (Rubel and colleagues, 2020).
• Why the microbiome after deworming does not return to the pattern of never-infected people, and whether that matters for health.
• Whether Blastocystis improves the gut or simply lives more easily in a healthy one, and which of its subtypes cause disease.
• Whether the Saccharomyces boulardii results, from small trials in a few countries, hold in larger, blinded trials, and whether the yeast changes the microbiome at all in these infections.
• Whether any microbiome test result, taken before or after treatment, leads to better outcomes for patients — with or without cancer.
• How the microbiome responds to antiparasitic treatment in people living in countries where worm infection is rare, since almost all human data come from places where it is common.

Connections

• Cancer and Parasites
• Stool Tests for Parasites and Their Limits
• How Parasites Evade the Immune System
• Parasite Cleanse Claims: Phases, Timing and Lifestyle
• Do Parasites Steal Your Nutrients?
• Your Microbiome
• The Gut Barrier and Your Microbiome
• Probiotics
• Probiotic Strains and Selection
• Blastocystis
• Giardia
• Giardiasis Treatment: Metronidazole and Tinidazole
• Entamoeba histolytica
• Whipworm
• Ascaris
• Tapeworm

Key Research Papers

1. Rubel MA, Abbas A, Taylor LJ, Connell A, Tanes C, Bittinger K, Ndze VN, Fonsah JY, Ngwang E, Essiane A, Fokunang C, Njamnshi AK, Bushman FD, Tishkoff SA. Lifestyle and the presence of helminths is associated with gut microbiome composition in Cameroonians. Genome Biol. 2020;21(1):122. PubMed PMID: 32450885
2. Ngwese MM, Adegbite BR, Zinsou JF, Fitzstevens JL, Schmidt VT, Moure PAN, Maloum MN, Tyakht AV, Huus KE, Youngblut ND, Kremsner PG, Adegnika AA, Ley RE. Infection with gut parasites correlates with gut microbiome diversity across human populations in Africa. Gut Microbes. 2025;17(1):2587966. PubMed PMID: 41358671
3. Taye B, Mekonnen Z, Belanger KD, Davenport ER. Gut-microbiome profiles among Soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) infected Ethiopian children enrolled in the school-based mass deworming program. PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 2024;18(10):e0012485. PubMed PMID: 39405336
4. Tee MZ, Er YX, Easton AV, Yap NJ, Lee IL, Devlin J, Chen Z, Ng KS, Subramanian P, Angelova A, Oyesola O, Sargsian S, Ngui R, Beiting DP, Boey CCM, Chua KH, Cadwell K, Lim YAL, Loke P, Lee SC. Gut microbiome of helminth-infected indigenous Malaysians is context dependent. Microbiome. 2022;10(1):214. PubMed PMID: 36476263
5. Mu W, Ma P, Wang Y, Li Y, Ding Y, Zou Y, Pu L, Yan Q, Kong H, Guo X, Guo A, Li H, Wang S. Taeniasis impacts human gut microbiome composition and function. ISME J. 2024;18(1):wrae213. PubMed PMID: 39441994
6. Grondin JA, Jamal A, Mowna S, Seto T, Khan WI. Interaction between Intestinal Parasites and the Gut Microbiota: Implications for the Intestinal Immune Response and Host Defence. Pathogens. 2024;13(8):608. PubMed PMID: 39204209
7. Rosa BA, Supali T, Gankpala L, Djuardi Y, Sartono E, Zhou Y, Fischer K, Martin J, Tyagi R, Bolay FK, Fischer PU, Yazdanbakhsh M, Mitreva M. Differential human gut microbiome assemblages during soil-transmitted helminth infections in Indonesia and Liberia. Microbiome. 2018;6(1):33. PubMed PMID: 29486796
8. Ramanan D, Bowcutt R, Lee SC, Tang MS, Kurtz ZD, Ding Y, Honda K, Gause WC, Blaser MJ, Bonneau RA, Lim YA, Loke P, Cadwell K. Helminth infection promotes colonization resistance via type 2 immunity. Science. 2016;352(6285):608-12. PubMed PMID: 27080105
9. Kodio A, Coulibaly D, Koné AK, Konaté S, Doumbo S, Guindo A, Bittar F, Gouriet F, Raoult D, Thera MA, Ranque S. Blastocystis Colonization Is Associated with Increased Diversity and Altered Gut Bacterial Communities in Healthy Malian Children. Microorganisms. 2019;7(12):649. PubMed PMID: 31817168
10. Asnicar F, Berry SE, Valdes AM, Nguyen LH, Piccinno G, Drew DA, Leeming E, Gibson R, Le Roy C, Khatib HA, Francis L, Mazidi M, Mompeo O, Valles-Colomer M, Tett A, Beghini F, Dubois L, Bazzani D, Thomas AM, Mirzayi C, Khleborodova A, Oh S, Hine R, Bonnett C, Capdevila J, Danzanvilliers S, Giordano F, Geistlinger L, Waldron L, Davies R, Hadjigeorgiou G, Wolf J, Ordovás JM, Gardner C, Franks PW, Chan AT, Huttenhower C, Spector TD, Segata N. Microbiome connections with host metabolism and habitual diet from 1,098 deeply phenotyped individuals. Nat Med. 2021;27(2):321-332. PubMed PMID: 33432175
11. Aykur M, Malatyalı E, Demirel F, Cömert-Koçak B, Gentekaki E, Tsaousis AD, Dogruman-Al F. Blastocystis: A Mysterious Member of the Gut Microbiome. Microorganisms. 2024;12(3):461. PubMed PMID: 38543512
12. Deng L, Lee JWJ, Tan KSW. Infection with pathogenic Blastocystis ST7 is associated with decreased bacterial diversity and altered gut microbiome profiles in diarrheal patients. Parasit Vectors. 2022;15(1):312. PubMed PMID: 36064620
13. Besirbellioglu BA, Ulcay A, Can M, Erdem H, Tanyuksel M, Avci IY, Araz E, Pahsa A. Saccharomyces boulardii and infection due to Giardia lamblia. Scand J Infect Dis. 2006;38(6-7):479-81. PubMed PMID: 16798698
14. Mansour-Ghanaei F, Dehbashi N, Yazdanparast K, Shafaghi A. Efficacy of saccharomyces boulardii with antibiotics in acute amoebiasis. World J Gastroenterol. 2003;9(8):1832-3. PubMed PMID: 12918131
15. Dinleyici EC, Eren M, Yargic ZA, Dogan N, Vandenplas Y. Clinical efficacy of Saccharomyces boulardii and metronidazole compared to metronidazole alone in children with acute bloody diarrhea caused by amebiasis: a prospective, randomized, open label study. Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2009;80(6):953-5. PubMed PMID: 19478257
16. Savaş-Erdeve S, Gökay S, Dallar Y. Efficacy and safety of Saccharomyces boulardii in amebiasis-associated diarrhea in children. Turk J Pediatr. 2009;51(3):220-4. PubMed PMID: 19817264
17. Dinleyici EC, Eren M, Dogan N, Reyhanioglu S, Yargic ZA, Vandenplas Y. Clinical efficacy of Saccharomyces boulardii or metronidazole in symptomatic children with Blastocystis hominis infection. Parasitol Res. 2011;108(3):541-5. PubMed PMID: 20922415
18. Suez J, Zmora N, Zilberman-Schapira G, Mor U, Dori-Bachash M, Bashiardes S, Zur M, Regev-Lehavi D, Ben-Zeev Brik R, Federici S, Horn M, Cohen Y, Moor AE, Zeevi D, Korem T, Kotler E, Harmelin A, Itzkovitz S, Maharshak N, Shibolet O, Pevsner-Fischer M, Shapiro H, Sharon I, Halpern Z, Segal E, Elinav E. Post-Antibiotic Gut Mucosal Microbiome Reconstitution Is Impaired by Probiotics and Improved by Autologous FMT. Cell. 2018;174(6):1406-1423.e16. PubMed PMID: 30193113
19. Muñoz P, Bouza E, Cuenca-Estrella M, Eiros JM, Pérez MJ, Sánchez-Somolinos M, Rincón C, Hortal J, Peláez T. Saccharomyces cerevisiae fungemia: an emerging infectious disease. Clin Infect Dis. 2005;40(11):1625-34. PubMed PMID: 15889360
20. Hassan H, Rompola M, Glaser AW, Kinsey SE, Phillips RS. Systematic review and meta-analysis investigating the efficacy and safety of probiotics in people with cancer. Support Care Cancer. 2018;26(8):2503-2509. PubMed PMID: 29704110
21. Sinha R, Abu-Ali G, Vogtmann E, Fodor AA, Ren B, Amir A, Schwager E, Crabtree J, Ma S, Abnet CC, Knight R, White O, Huttenhower C. Assessment of variation in microbial community amplicon sequencing by the Microbiome Quality Control (MBQC) project consortium. Nat Biotechnol. 2017;35(11):1077-1086. PubMed PMID: 28967885
22. Porcari S, Mullish BH, Asnicar F, Ng SC, Zhao L, Hansen R, O'Toole PW, Raes J, Hold G, Putignani L, Hvas CL, Zeller G, Koren O, Tun H, Valles-Colomer M, Collado MC, Fischer M, Allegretti J, Iqbal T, Chassaing B, Keller J, Baunwall SM, Abreu M, Barbara G, Zhang F, Ponziani FR, Costello SP, Paramsothy S, Kao D, Kelly C, Kupcinskas J, Youngster I, Franceschi F, Khanna S, Vehreschild M, Link A, De Maio F, Pasolli E, Miguez AB, Brigidi P, Posteraro B, Scaldaferri F, Stojanovic MR, Megraud F, Malfertheiner P, Masucci L, Arumugam M, Kaakoush N, Segal E, Bajaj J, Leong R, Cryan J, Weersma RK, Knight R, Guarner F, Shanahan F, Cani PD, Elinav E, Sanguinetti M, de Vos WM, El-Omar E, Dorè J, Marchesi J, Tilg H, Sokol H, Segata N, Cammarota G, Gasbarrini A, Ianiro G. International consensus statement on microbiome testing in clinical practice. Lancet Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2025;10(2):154-167. PubMed PMID: 39647502

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Helminth infection and the human gut microbiome
2. PubMed: Deworming and the gut microbiota
3. PubMed: Blastocystis and gut microbiome diversity
4. PubMed: Saccharomyces boulardii in giardiasis and amoebiasis trials
5. PubMed: Microbiome testing in clinical practice

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