Probiotic Supplements in Infants Might Curb Antibiotic Resistance, Study Suggests
Infants who received probiotic supplements had notably different gut microbiomes than those who did not, and they had fewer antibiotic-resistant genes.
A study of preterm infants in the UK suggests that those receiving probiotic supplements had “fewer antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) and multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens in their gut than those who didn’t, even when they also received antibiotics.” CIDRAP has the news.
The research team “analyzed the gut microbiome of 34 VLBW [very low birth weight] infants who were all exclusively fed human milk. The infants were split into two groups: the probiotics-supplemented (PS) cohort and the non-probiotic-supplemented (NPS) cohort.”
VLBW infants are sometimes given probiotics in the UK because they have “underdeveloped immune systems and are routinely administered broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infections with drug-resistant pathogens. Probiotics are used to counter the effects of early antibiotic exposure, which can disrupt the normal development of the infant gut microbiome and has been associated with higher levels of ARGs in preterm infants.”
The analysis revealed that “the gut microbiomes of the PS infants were notably different from those of the NPS infants, with the former dominated by Bifidobacterium and the latter dominated by pathobionts (species that under certain conditions can become pathogenic).” The abundance of ARGs was also “significantly higher in NPS infants than PS infants across the first three weeks.” Both the antibiotic-treated and control infants in the NPS group “had higher ARG counts than their counterparts in the PS.” They concluded that the presence of probiotics “significantly reduce[s] the presence of antibiotic resistance genes and multidrug-resistant bacteria in the infant gut.”
