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m15i | 2 years ago

how does antibiotic medication affect our gut microbiota generally, and our alzheimer’s disease risk specifically?

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XorNot|2 years ago

This is asking the wrong question: for example, there are antibiotics you are prescribed for IBS because generally they tend to have a balancing effect on the gut microbiome. I've done a course every year or two when things get unmanageable, since it's a good reset.

In this context, a treatment which reduced risk would likely be a combination of antibiotics and probiotics to try and shift the biome to a different one.

Llamamoe|2 years ago

This is antibiotic marketing bs. There are antibiotic that harm pathogenic or prone-to-overgrowth bacteria harder than others, but they ALL lead to a state of dysbiosis and susceptibility to subsequent colonization/overgrowth/dysregulation

And this is the exact reason whymost of the time, GI problems come back or are replaced with different symptoms after antibiotics, and why we need more Fecal Microbiota Transplant research.

Llamamoe|2 years ago

tl;dr: Long-term harm that might happen to kill off whatever's harming you in the process, but don't count on it.

Long version: It depends on specific antibiotic- generally, they wipe a portion of the strains completely, suppress most of the rest, and give anything resistant the opportunity to grow out of control, a state which persists for weeks to months during which you're extra susceptible to external pathogens, food poisoning, etc. A healthy microbiome is resilient, and sadly if you don't have one, FMT is the only way to do it.