Antibiotic use and its consequences for the normal microbiome

By Martin J. Blaser. Science, 2016

753 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Anti-infectives, including antibiotics, are essentially different from all other drugs; they not only affect the individual to whom they are given but also the entire community, through selection for resistance to their own action. Thus, their use resides at the intersection of personal and public health. Antibiotics can be likened to a four-edged sword against bacteria. The first two edges of the antibiotic sword were identified immediately after their discovery and deployment in that they not only benefit an individual in treating their infection but also benefit the community in preventing the spread of that infectious agent. The third edge was already recognized by Alexander Fleming in 1945 in his Nobel acceptance speech, which warned about the cost to the community of antibiotic resistance that would inevitably evolve and be selected for during clinical practice. We have seen this cost mount up, as resistance curtails or precludes the activities of some of our most effective drugs for clinically important infections. But the fourth edge of the antibiotic sword remained unappreciated until recently, i.e., the cost that an antibiotic exerts on an individual’s own health via the collateral damage of the drug on bacteria that normally live on or in healthy humans: our microbiota. These organisms, their genes, metabolites, and interactions with one another, as well as with their host collectively, represent our microbiome. Our relationship with these symbiotic bacteria is especially important during the early years of life, when the adult microbiome has not yet formed.

Subfields: Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43fa00d9726d6478287006b90981234037c255de

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In Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

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Citations in the corpus

Extensive impact of non-antibiotic drugs on human gut bacteria (2018, neutral): “Antibacterial activity has been previously reported for many, including the antifungal imidazoles 12 (11 in our screen), but for others (e.g. the antivirals saquinavir and trifluridine) such activity is new.”
The Central Nervous System and the Gut Microbiome (2016, background): “Perturbations of the microbial community may have significant impacts on the developing individual, with long-lasting effects on metabolism, physiology, and immune status, as has been suggested in animal studies (Blaser, 2016; Kuperman and Koren, 2016; Zeissig and Blumberg, 2014).”
Antimicrobial Resistance: Implications and Costs (2019, background): “extent, to further grow herds at subtherapeutic levels, and to elevate feed efficiency.(9,27,29,30) For instance, one of the”
Gut Microbiome: Profound Implications for Diet and Disease (2019, background): “Antibiotic use and modern sanitation have contributed to a decrease in the diversity of the human microbiome [287].”