There’s a globalpush for doctors and patients to use antibiotics more
judiciously, largely because overusing them is contributing to growing
resistance—meaning that some infections that were previously treatable no
longer respond well to medications. Now, a new study in mice suggests that
antibiotics may come with another potential health consequence. They could be
interfering with the microbiome—a community of bacteria that live in the gut
and elsewhere—and these changes may be passed down through generations and may
cause disease.
In the study, published Monday in
the journal Nature Microbiology, researchers gave healthy
pregnant mice either a normal microbiome or one that had been exposed to
antibiotics. Once the mice pups were born, the researchers found that the
microbiome changes in the mothers had been passed on to their offspring.
The researchers also looked at a
group of mice that were engineered to be at a higher risk for developing
colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The researchers followed
the offspring of these mice for five months and discovered that the pups who
had been born to a mother with a microbiome perturbed by antibiotics had
substantially worse colitis than the mice that inherited a normal microbiome.
“What’s important is that the
pups never [received] antibiotics and their mothers never [received]
antibiotics,” says study author Dr. Martin Blaser, director of the Human
Microbiome Program at NYU Langone Medical Center. This may mean that the
effects of antibiotic treatment are long lasting and far reaching, Blaser says.
Prior studies in
humans have linked antibiotic exposure to a higher
risk for IBD, which is thought to affect about 1.3million Americans. Blaser says that the new study’s findings add to
the evidence that antibiotic overuse may cause health complications even beyond
antibiotic resistance.
“A lot of pregnant women are
taking antibiotics, and a lot of teen girls are taking antibiotics,” says
Blaser. “We are concerned that it could have an effect on the next generation.”
They hypothesized that the
exposed microbiomes would impact the disease risk of the mice pups, but Blaser
says the researchers were surprised by how substantial the effect was.
The study was in mice—not in
humans—but the results suggest that the topic is worth exploring, Blaser says.
He says that researchers know that IBD has a genetic component, but so far, the
genes associated with the disorder are thought to make up only about 10% of a
person’s risk for the disease, and the other 90% of the risk is unknown. Blaser
says he believes that some of the unknown risk could be due to antibiotics and
that the new findings add support to the recommendation to avoid unnecessary
antibiotic exposure.
“I am not against antibiotics,
but we have to use them much more wisely,” says Blaser. “I think that we are going
to find out more and more that [antibiotic exposure] has a disease cost
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