A study encompassing over 4 million children found “no association between antibiotic exposure during pregnancy or early infancy and increased incidence of autoimmune diseases.” CIDRAP has the news.
Antibiotics are the “most commonly prescribed medication in young children and are frequently overused, and animal research suggests antibiotic exposure at an early age may increase the risk of [autoimmune diseases] by disrupting the gut microbiome while it’s still developing.” Studies on the topic have produced conflicting results to this point, but this new study posits that “previous research has been limited by potential confounding variables.”
The researchers used data from April 2009 through to December 2020 to analyze autoimmune-related outcomes in “two distinct groups—children who were exposed to antibiotics during pregnancy and those who were exposed during infancy or early childhood—and compared them with children who had no antibiotic exposure.” The outcomes of interest included six autoimmune conditions, including type 1 diabetes, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease. The researchers “used inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to adjust for known risk factors and conducted sibling-matched analyses.”
Both cohorts – children exposed to antibiotics in utero and those exposed in early infancy – were found to have “no association between antibiotic exposure and increased incidence of any of the six autoimmune conditions.” The authors wrote that this “underscores the importance of carefully accounting for the underlying indications for antibiotic use and familial genetic susceptibility when interpreting” associations between antibiotic use and autoimmune conditions.