Review Article Bacteriotherapy: A Strategic Update for Oral Physicians.

As we know, there is a lot of information now in the public domain on the use of probiotics to gain a beneficial effect within the digestive tract. In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in the use of probiotics in maintaining good oral health and treating oral infections. Evidence now suggests that probiotics may function not only by direct inhibition of, or enhanced competition with, pathogenic micro-organisms, but also by more subtle mechanisms including modulation of the mucosal immune system. Similarly, prebiotics could promote the growth of beneficial micro-organisms that comprise part of the resident microbiota. A complete understanding of the broad ecological changes induced in the mouth by probiotics or prebiotics will be essential to assess their long-term consequences for oral health and disease. This paper will review the data on the use of probiotics for oral care or disease prevention, and discuss some of the issues that arise from their use, as well as identify questions that still need to be answered.