Children who took antibiotics gain more weight
Kids who receive antibiotics throughout the course of their childhoods gain weight faster than those who don’t, according to new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research.
The findings, published online in the International Journal of Obesity, suggest that antibiotics may have a compounding effect throughout childhood on body mass index (BMI), a measure often used to determine whether someone is at a healthy weight.
“Your BMI may be forever altered by the antibiotics you take as a child,” says study leader Brian S. Schwartz, MD, MS, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School. “Our data suggest that every time we give an antibiotic to kids they gain weight faster over time.”
For the study, Schwartz and his colleagues analyzed Geisinger Health System’s electronic health records on 163,820 children between three and 18 years old from January 2001 to February 2012. They examined body weight and height and antibiotic use in the previous year as well as any earlier years for which Geisinger had records for the children.
At age 15, children who had taken antibiotics seven or more times during childhood weighed about three pounds more than those who received no antibiotics, they found. Approximately 21% of the kids in the study, or almost 30,000 children, had received seven or more prescriptions during childhood.
There is growing evidence that antibiotics could lead to weight gain because of the effect that they have on what is known as the microbiota, or the microorganisms that inhabit the body. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in the human body than our own cells.
Many of these bacteria do their work in the gastrointestinal tract, helping the body to digest food and absorb nutrients. Antibiotics kill off harmful bacteria but also those vital to gastrointestinal health. Research has shown that repeated antibiotics use can forever change the microbiota, altering the way it breaks down food and increasing the calories of nutrients absorbed. This, in turn, can increase weight gain.
