Dispensing antibiotics too often to babies and toddlers could leave the youngsters vulnerable to developing allergies and asthma, according to a team of United States-based doctors and scientists.
Extra dosages "may disrupt the digestive microbiome at a significant time in a child’s development”, the researchers warn, explaining that they found “repeated antibiotic use before age two” to be “associated with a higher risk for asthma, food allergies and hay fever later in life”.
“Antibiotics are important and sometimes life-saving medicines, but not all infections in young kids need to be treated with antibiotics," says Rutgers University associate professor of paediatrics and epidemiology Dr Daniel Horton, who carried out the research with counterparts based at New York University Medical Center and Stanford University School of Medicine.
Published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the findings were based on what the team described as “a retrospective cohort study” of health data foraround one million people in Britain between 1987 and 2020.
The team say that while “early-childhood antibiotic exposure has been implicated in the development of chronic paediatric conditions”, many of the previous studies that fleshed out the link did not adequately check for “confounding” factors that could make it difficult to determine cause and effect related to antibiotics.
In a 2022 Journal of Infection paper, researchers based at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and the University of Melbourne, Australia, said that while a “causal association” linking children being given antibiotics and subsequent health troubles “cannot be determined”, “sound antibiotic stewardship”was needed to avoid “adverse long-term health outcomes”.
Many doctors and scientists have been warning that overuse and misuse of antibiotics, including as an ingredient in animal feed, is contributing to a wider problem of antimicrobial resistance, where bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.
That in turn renders certain medications ineffective, leaving people vulnerable to deadly infections. – dpa
