- Experts say most Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections occur while taking antibiotics.
- Researchers say antibiotics aren’t always effective in these cases because the medications can reduce the amount of “good” bacteria in the gut and can sometimes cause the bacteria to become more drug-resistant.
- A second, longer treatment regimen of antibiotics is sometimes prescribed.
- Experts say there are foods you can eat and liquids you can drink that can also help.
Clostridioides difficile(C. diff) is a bacterium that can infect the large intestine.
Antibiotics used to treat it have been traditionally evaluated in a monoculture – not considering interactions with other bacteria.
A new study published today in the journal PLOS Biology assessed two antibiotics in a diverse human gut community to better understand the interactions and how antibiotics affect C. diff growth.
Previous testing on the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating C. diff has used monocultures – cultures containing one bacterium.
For this research, the authors built a model that contained diverse human bacteria to see how two antibiotics, vancomycin and metronidazole, worked while interacting with the varied gut microbiome.
They said they discovered that there were two leading reasons why antibiotics sometimes did not effectively treat C. diff:
- Antibiotics reduce the number of “good” bacteria in our gut. This allows C. diff to grow without competition from other bacteria.
- The effects of other bacteria lead to the sequestration of metals in our intestines, which allows the C. diff to become more tolerant of the antibiotics.
Ophelia Venturelli, an assistant professor in the Biochemistry College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who worked on the study, said their findings can help scientists to develop antibiotics more targeted to fighting C. diff infections.
Antibiotics clearing out bacteria in the large intestine and leaving it vulnerable to infection is…
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