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Taking a course of antibiotics for too long could be a bigger problem than not taking it long enough:
It is time to reconsider the widespread advice that people should always complete an entire course of antibiotics, experts in the BMJ say.
They argue there is not enough evidence to back the idea that stopping pills early encourages antibiotic resistance.
Instead, they suggest, more studies need to be done to see if other strategies - such as stopping once feeling better - can help cut antibiotic use.
But GPs urge people not to change their behaviour in the face of one study.
[...] The opinion piece, by a team of researchers from across England, argues that reducing the use of antibiotics is essential to help combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.
Prof Martin Llewelyn, from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, together with colleagues, argues that using antibiotics for longer than necessary can increase the risk of resistance.
He suggests traditional long prescriptions for antibiotics were based on the outdated idea that resistance to an antibiotic could develop when a drug was not taken for a lengthy time and an infection was undertreated.
Instead, he says, there is now growing evidence that short courses of antibiotics - lasting three to five days, for example - work just as well to treat many bugs.
Also at Scientific American and Newsweek.
The antibiotic course has had its day (open, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.j3418) (DX)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday July 28 2017, @02:10AM (2 children)
There's also the fact that evolution potentially works considerably differently in bacteria than in "higher" organisms, since they engage in horizontal gene transfer. A healthy person is loaded with symbiotic bacteria that get just as hammered by broad-spectrum antibiotics - except they don't really have to contend with the immune system in the same way. So while antibiotics may (nearly) wipe out an infection so that your immune system can sweep up the stragglers, the resistant symbiotes though repopulate, and may engage in gene transfer with the next infection that passes through.
As an aside, I've been curious as to whether bacteria demonstrate any "intent" with gene transfer - i.e. is the process random, or are useful genes more likely to be transferred?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @05:54AM (1 child)
Sorry to sound trite but "yes"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @08:56AM
Sorry, let me rephrase that: are useful genes more likely to be transferred?