Antibiotics may up Type 1 diabetes risk in children
Parents need to be extra careful while giving
antibiotics to children as new research has found that the commonly-prescribed
drug can significantly increase the risk of Type 1 diabetes.
In Type 1 diabetes, the immune system
mistakenly destroys the islet cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.
Without insulin, patients cannot properly control their levels of blood sugar
(glucose), which builds up to damage nerves and blood vessels.
A study conducted on mice found that
antibiotics changed the mix of gut microbes in their young ones and
dramatically raised their risk for Type 1 diabetes.
"Our study begins to clarify the
mechanisms by which antibiotic-driven changes in gut microbiomes may increase
risk for Type 1 diabetes," said Martin Blaser, Professor at New York University (NYU)
in the US.
In the study, the team examined the effects
of exposure to either continuous low-dose antibiotics or pulsed antibiotic
therapy (PAT), which mimics the doses used to treat many infections in
children.
Short pulses of antibiotics caused non-obese
diabetic (NOD) mice -- that are more susceptible to Type 1 diabetes -- to
develop the disease more quickly and more often than mice not treated with
antibiotics.
Specifically, male NOD mice exposed to PAT
were found to have twice (53 per cent) the incidence of Type 1 diabetes as
control NOD mice (26 per cent incidence) that received no antibiotics.
PAT did not significantly increase disease
risk in female mice in one set of experiments, but did so in a second set of
tests.
"This is the first study of its kind
suggesting that antibiotic use can alter the microbiota and have lasting
effects on immunological and metabolic development, resulting in
autoimmunity," said Jessica Dunne, Director at Juvenile Diabetes Research
Foundation (JDRF) which is a US-based research organisation.
As children's exposure to microbe-killing
antibiotics has increased in recent decades, the incidence of autoimmune
diseases like Type 1 diabetes has more than doubled, said the paper published in
the journal Nature Microbiology.
For the research, the team collected samples
of gut bacteria from NOD mice to determine the effects of antibiotics.
Using genomic and statistical techniques, the
team found that three-week-old PAT males had a nearly complete loss in their
intestines of certain bacteria shown in past studies to normally train the
immune system.
The diversity of species in PAT-treated
microbiomes was lower than in control mice, and the composition of the
bacterial communities differed greatly, the researchers concluded.
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