Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

A new study done by researchers from the University of Exeter claims that treatments which involve the administration of antibiotics should stop as soon as possible so that patients do not get past the “tipping point” of becoming resistant to the effects of antibiotics.

Professor Robert Beardmore from the University of Exeter who led the research team reports that the team has discovered new evidence which claims that cutting short the length of the antibiotic course will reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance.

Scientists, under suitable laboratory conditions, studied how microbial communities- which are groups of microorganisms that live together inside the body- responded to the different antibiotics cycling patterns- in which the antibiotic administration is either restricted or increased.

The study was published recently in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. Scientists discovered that changes in the dose and the period for which antibiotics administered and in sugar levels- which is similar to the variable sugar levels seen in human patients- had the potential to drive these microbes beyond a “tipping point”- after which it became impossible for the microbes to reverse the effect of antibiotic resistance.

If, during treatment, the tipping point was unintentionally passed, it would probably increase the number of resistant species inside the body even after the antibiotic treatment is stopped. “It’s a sensible idea that when you take an antibiotic away, resistance goes away too, but we wondered what kinds of antibiotic treatments don’t behave like that. After all, in some clinical studies, resistance didn’t disappear when the antibiotic did”, added Professor Beardmore.

Doctors have always recommended that patients complete their antibiotic courses thinking that taking only a few pills will lead to mutations in the bacteria and they will become more resistant, but now a lot of studies suggest that the longer microbes are in touch with antibiotics, the more resistant they will become.

Further research needs to be done to understand how the length of the antibiotic resistance affects resistance.

In the study done by the University of Exeter, the research team observed how communities of microorganisms which contained Candida albicans and Candida glabrata responded to different doses of an antibiotic after being fed with sugar. Both the species occur in healthy people but can also cause infection under some specific conditions.

The results showed that after adding the antimicrobial, the communities were significantly reduced but after the treatment was stopped, they began to grow again.

Professor Ivana Gudelj, who is the co-author of the study said, “Our body is a mother ship for microbial communities but we’ve still expected to understand drug resistance by studying microbial species one at a time, in the lab. We show this can be misleading because microbes have intricate relationships that the drugs make even more complicated, and yet our theories of antibiotic resistance have ignored this, until now. So that’s the first surprise: even sugars can affect antibiotic resistance.”

By Purnima

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