Rushing your kids to the ER so that they can get antibiotics every time they get the sniffles can have an unexpected adverse impact on their health, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University that repeated use of the medications could cause kids to gain weight far more quickly than normal.
Researchers reported in Wednesday’s edition of the International Journal of Obesity that using antibiotics may have a compounding effect throughout childhood on body mass index (BMI), a metric typically used to determine if an individual is at a healthy weight, overweight, or obese.
In fact, lead investigator Dr. Brian S. Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg school, said that a person’s BMI “may be forever altered” by the antibiotics he or she takes while growing up. Data collected by his team suggests that “every time we give an antibiotic to kids they gain weight faster over time,” he added.
Between January 2011 and February 2012, the authors analyzed the electronic health records of more than 163,000 kids between the ages of 3 and 18. They also examined height and body weight (to determine BMI), and antibiotic use during the past year and previous years.
Overuse of antibiotics could harm the gut microbiota
They discovered that by age 15, approximately 21 percent of the children involved in the study (roughly 30,000 kids) had received seven or more prescriptions for antibiotics. Those who had taken the medications at least seven times during the course of their youth weighed three pounds more, on average, than those who had not used antibiotics at all.
“While the magnitude of the weight increase attributable to antibiotics may be modest by the end of childhood, our finding that the effects are cumulative raises the possibility that these effects continue and are compounded into adulthood,” Dr. Schwartz said. Given that scientists working with penicillin previously reported that it caused weight gain in animals, the link between use of the treatment and weight gain makes sense biologically, he added.
Furthermore, the Johns Hopkins team pointed out that there is other evidence suggesting the use of antibiotics could lead to weight gain due to their affect on the microorganisms that inhabit the human body (also known as the microbiota). While using antibiotics kills harmful bacteria, it can also destroy microbes essential to gastrointestinal health, permanently altering how the body breaks down food, increasing the calories of absorbed nutrients, and causing weight gain.
Previous research had suggested that antibiotic use in very young children could lead to weight gain, but this new study indicates that overreliance at any age can cause kids to pack on pounds, and that the effect only increases with age. Dr. Schwartz said that the findings show that the use of systematic antibiotics “should be avoided except when strongly indicated.”
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