Are Your Medications Hurting Your Gut? Common Medications May Be Acting as Unintended Bactericides

Most everyone knows, or should know, that orally administered antibiotics destroy vast numbers of both the good and harmful bacteria that comprise the microbiome.  Recent research has shown that the microbiome is also vulnerable to more than two hundred other medications that are not specifically antibiotics, like blood pressure medication, antihistimines, and painkillers.

The research, undertaken by the European Melocular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, was made possible by new techniques that permit the culture of anaerobic bacteria that live only in the absence of oxygen -- like those in the microbiome.  

The research also found that the same bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics were also resistant to adverse effects from other medications.  An important revelation of this research is that antibiotic resistance can occur even when antibiotics are not used.  

For Crohn's Disease patients, this is important news.  Ensuring a healthy microbiome is an essential approach to ensuring that a dysbiosis in the microbiome -- a hallmark of a Crohn's Disease inflammation flare -- does not occur.  Knowing that many other medications, in addition to antibiotics, can adversely affect the microbiome is critically important. 

Source:  Maier, Lisa, et al., "Extensive Impact of Non-Antibiotic Drugs on Human Gut Bacteria," Nature 555, 623-628 (19 March 2018).