Can antibiotics actually harm children in the most crucial years of development? Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia seem to think so thanks to a retrospective study based on electronic health records from the CHOP Care Network.
The results show that exposing a child to broad-spectrum antibiotics that treat a wide range of bacterial infections during the first two years of life can increase the risk of childhood obesity. No link was found between narrow-spectrum drugs and obesity.
In particular, the study looked at the effect of antibiotics on a child’s microbiome, the population of bacteria within the intestines that forms a symbiotic relationship with the person and helps with energy metabolism.
“The thought is that the microbiome may be critically dependent on what is going on during infancy,” said the lead author of the study, Charles Bailey M.D. PhD in a statement.
Researchers looked at twelve years of electronic data that corresponded to 64,580 children with annual visits at 0 to 23 months with more visits at 24 to 59 months. They focused on diagnoses and prescriptions before 24 months of age and the onset of obesity in the following three years.
“Treating obesity is going to be a matter of finding the collection of things that together have a major effect, even though each alone has only a small effect,” said the study’s senior author Patricia DeRusso M.D. in a statement. “Part of what we are exploring in this study is one of those factors that we can possibly modify in the way we take care of kids and make it better.”
For a more thorough glimpse into this medical phenomenon, future studies on the subject will focus on larger groups across different populations. For the time being, CHOP researchers are searching for ways to circumvent obesity which has doubled in children over the past 30 years and poses a number of medical, developmental and social problems throughout one’s lifetime.
