So we have all heard about some of the potential dangers
associated with excessive antibiotic use such as antibiotic resistant. However,
a study shows that antibiotics could also be knocking out some of the bacteria
in your stomach, which could play a role in making our kids fat. At this point,
it seems like there is more of a correlation between babies being given
antibiotics before they were 6 months old and those babies growing up to be
overweight toddlers. Evidence suggests this, but it hasn’t been completely
confirmed. The article (listed below) goes through and explains many different
experiments/studies that suggests the relationship between antibiotic use and
chubby children. One portion of the article references how “small amounts of
antibiotics increase the weight of livestock by as much as 15 percent.” If this
is true in livestock, does it make sense that we could have a similar outcome
when given antibiotics? If it is true, which bacteria are being killed and what
other effects does this have on our bodies? From my perspective, even if
antibiotics were causing more and more children to become overweight, how would
doctors be able to control the situation? It is interesting to take a closer
look at how medical advances and better prescription medications can have the
potential to influence something that has usually been thought to be influenced
by a single individual through their eating habits (though I’m not negating
that diet has the most role in weight gain/loss). Looking through multiple
articles makes me wonder “what isn’t making us fatter?” For more information
regarding the specifics on the links between antibiotic use and increased
likeliness for obesity in children, take a peak at the article I’ve posted
below.
New york times recently had an interesting article about the side effects of fluoroquinolones, a class of very strong antibiotics that are being over-prescribed:
ReplyDeletehttp://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/popular-antibiotics-may-carry-serious-side-effects/.
I think this is a really interesting article, and my first thought is that this comes down to the microbiome. Recently, there has been more interest on the differences in the gut microbiome between obese and lean people, and several studies in mice have shown that diet will select for different microbiota. Here's an article published in nature on the subject:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/pdf/nature05414.pdf
It doesn't address antibiotics so much, but it's easy to imagine the way antibiotics might influence the gut microbiome, and how difficult it might be to get the good inhabitants back afterwards.
The Nature article is interesting, but I wonder how much this study would translate to human health. I would imagine that livestock would be exposed to antibiotics for a large portion of their life chronically, but in the case of a child exposure would be short. It would be cool to see if these effects with mice are reversible after removal of the antibiotic and replenishing of the microbiota.
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