One of the biggest campaigns in regard to the reasonable use of medicines is focused on antibiotics, very powerful drugs that misused can have serious consequences, especially when we talk about young children. Among them, stop curing when really necessary. They are recommended only to cure infections caused by bacteria and provided they are prescribed by a doctor. The attempt to reduce their consumption reaches the point that pediatricians ask for a test that detects when to give antibiotics and thus prescribe them without a mistake and avoid consequences such as the one that has just been discovered.
An investigation carried out by researchers from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and recently presented at the International Congress of the European Respiratory Society concludes, after analyzing a total of 22 studies, that giving antibiotics in the first years of life is related to an increased risk of developing allergies later.
The research compiled studies carried out from 1966 to 2015 in which a total of almost 400 thousand patients were involved in which the association between antibiotic consumption during the first two years of life and the risk of eczema or hay fever was analyzed later in the life.
According to the results, the use of antibiotics in the first years of life raised the risk of eczema between 15 percent and 41 percent, depending on the type of study analyzed, while the risk of developing hay fever in old age increased between 14 percent and 56 percent, also depending on the type of study analyzed.
Administering antibiotics during the first three years of life deteriorates the intestinal flora of the baby by negatively altering its composition. The intestinal flora is the set of good bacteria that lodge in the intestine and that meets an important autoimmune function in babies, so if this function is altered by reducing the immune response, with an unstable intestinal flora, the child has less protection against allergic diseases.
Via | Science Daily
In Babies and more | In which cases are antibiotics useful? Antibiotics: use them well
