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Antibiotic use is known to have a near-immediate impact on our gut microbiota and long-term use may leave us drug resistant and vulnerable to infection.
Now there is mounting laboratory evidence that in the increasingly complex, targeted treatment of cancer, judicious use of antibiotics also is needed to ensure these infection fighters don't have the unintended consequence of also hampering cancer treatment, scientists report.
Any negative impact of antibiotics on cancer treatment appears to go back to the gut and to whether the microbiota is needed to help activate the T cells driving treatment response, says Dr. Gang Zhou, immunologist at the Georgia Cancer Center and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.
"It likely depends on what types of therapy physicians are giving to patients and how often they also are giving them antibiotics," says Zhou, corresponding author of the study in the journal Oncotarget.
They have some of the first evidence that in some of the newest therapies, the effect of antibiotics is definitely mixed. Infections are typically the biggest complication of chemotherapy, and antibiotics are commonly prescribed to prevent and treat them.
"We give a lot of medications to prevent infections," says Dr. Locke Bryan, hematologist/oncologist at the Georgia Cancer Center and MCG.
"White blood cell counts can go so low that you have no defense against bacteria, and that overwhelming infection can be lethal," says Bryan, a study co-author.
In this high-stakes arena, where chemotherapy is increasingly packaged with newer immunotherapies, Bryan, Zhou and their colleagues have more evidence that antibiotics' impact on the microbiota can mean that T cells, key players of the immune response, are less effective and some therapies might be too.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 05 2018, @08:18PM (2 children)
... when they prescribe antibiotics. Is this true?
American doctors don't do that. I expect they regard yogurt as snake oil
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(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Monday March 05 2018, @10:07PM
I don't know but it's logical. Antibiotics often wreck havoc on gut bacteria, knocking things far off balance. Yogurt and other probiotics can help maintain and restore it. IV antibiotics are better in this regard.
As usual it's a multi-level problem. In the US, medicine is big business, with too many laws, lawyers, huge $ in lawsuits. Medical practitioners are in such a tight spot they're rarely recommending anything. I'm very much "in the thick of it" and I could write volumes. They want to help, but you can tell they're somewhere between cautious and scared. But in fact, in the case I'm helping with, they do recommend yogurt (here in USA). But we've got some of the nation's top docs, nurses, etc.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @06:33AM
American doctors prescribe probiotic capsules that can survive stomach acid (the main reason for stomach acid is to kill pathogens). Before anyone goes all "this is just like Big Pharma to make a pill out of something simple", the vast majority of yogurt in the US do not have live bacteria and lactobacillis (yogurt bacteria) are not the only probiotics.