What’s Going on with Antibiotic Resistance?
Seasonal Antibiotic Usage and its Effect on Resistance
Background
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria (bacteria that no longer respond to antibiotic medicines that are commonly prescribed to those with infections) have been a rising issue in the field of healthcare, and scientists are continually attempting to find ways of combating strains of diseases that fall into this category. The typical response has been to simply stop providing antibiotics as frequently, but evidence from these attempts are proving to be inconsistent at best, with some results showing no benefit to stopping antibiotic prescription. Because of this, it has become clear that more research needs to be done to understand more specific factors that go into what causes antibiotic resistance and what can be done to combat it.
To find a correlation between antibiotic usage and the growing strength of diseases, scientists began to look at seasonal antibiotic usage, or which antibiotics are used most heavily in the spring and winter time when these medicines are most commonly prescribed. Since different bacteria are more virulent during various seasons of year, there are several antibiotic types that are prescribed during those seasons to combat specific infections. The scientists in this study chose 5 different antibiotic classes to study: penicillins, macrolides, nitrofurans, quinolones, and tetracyclines.
Summary
The study conducted in this article hoped to find a relationship between the seasonal usage of antibiotics and the resistance that results in turn. The antibiotics studied were S. aureus (the bacteria that commonly causes Staph infections), E. coli (bacteria that is found in healthy humans, but when out of control can cause serious digestive issues), and K. pneumoniae (which can cause the upper respiratory infection known as pneumonia). These three bacteria are well known and worked with, and because of that the researchers were able to extract plenty of data from health insurance usage at hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts.
What was found in the results of the study was that all antibiotics, not just the ones in season, had bacteria that were increasingly resistant to them. For example, the usage of penicillin and macrolides (which target Staph and Strep infections, respectively) is most common in the winter months, and it was expected that those two would have the most increased rates of resistance. Instead, all of the antibiotics, including those with peaks of usage in other seasons or biannually, had bacteria that increased in resistance against them.
In the antibiotics tested, there was a correlation between the season of winter and bacteria developing a resistance to the antibiotics. This is controversial to the original hypothesis that each antibiotic would have the bacteria that it targets become more resistant only in the season in which the antibiotic is most prescribed. To conclude their findings, the scientists that conducted the study decided that the likely cause of their findings is that their experimental model used is not enough to explain seasonal usage of antibiotics and the resistance that ensues.
To account for this conclusion, there is a possibility that there are additional factors at work that are causing the model to be insufficient in capturing the whole effect of seasonal resistance, such as demographic groups and similarities between antibiotic groups. Different demographic groups can affect resistance data because different descendants of groups can be more susceptible for certain diseases, which can affect whether or not antibiotics are effective. Similarities between antibiotic types are also a possible contributing factor. Since many antibiotics are similar in function and properties, it can be reasoned that there can be some similarities in bacterial resistance among multiple types of antibiotics as well. This research may be a step towards more studies on antibiotic resistance in the future; it is recommended that this be a step towards creating solutions that will lessen the harmful effects that resistance causes.
If you are interested in reading more research on this topic, you can find similar research in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
Grove City College students can find any of these journals by simply searching the journal name in Discover on the Henry Buhl Library’s homepage. And don’t forget — if you’d like to find more related resources, the library maintains a list of A-Z Databases with an entire tab dedicated to biology!
