Study Finds Link Between Repeated Antibiotic Use in Children and Certain Chronic Conditions

A new study has found links between repeated antibiotic use in children and the development of chronic conditions. CIDRAP has the news.

The study found that “antibiotic exposure before age 2 years was positively associated with asthma, food allergy, hay fever, and intellectual disability, with stronger associations observed following multiple antibiotic courses.” One hypothesis as to why this could be the case is that “antibiotics disrupt the gut microbiome, which is still in development in infants.”

Researchers examined electronic health record data from the United Kingdom’s Clinical Practice Research Datalink, “which contains records on medications and clinical diagnoses in UK primary care settings from 1987 through 2020. The primary exposure was prescriptions to antibiotics within 2 years of birth. The primary outcome was asthma / allergic conditions, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopmental / psychiatric conditions in children ages 27 months to 12 years.”

A total of 1,091,499 children were included in the study, and 62.8% of them were exposed to antibiotics. Any antibiotic exposure was associated with a higher risk for asthma, food allergy, and allergic rhinitis. The relationship was “even stronger in the dose-response analysis,” with those three conditions all being even more strongly associated with multiple antibiotic courses.

The study is observational and “doesn’t prove that early antibiotic exposure caused [these] conditions.” However, the hypothesis regarding microbiome disruption is based on experiments in mice that showed early exposure to antibiotics “changes microbial diversity in ways that can produce long-term effects.”