Children who receive antibiotics throughout the course of their childhood gain weight significantly faster than those who do not, says a new study. The findings suggest that early antibiotics use may have a compounding effect 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,” said study leader Brian Schwartz, professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US. “Our data suggest that every time we give an antibiotic to kids they gain weight faster over time,” Schwartz noted. For the study, the researchers analysed health records of 163,820 children between three and 18 years old from January 2001 to February 2012. They examined body weight and height (which are used to determine BMI) and antibiotic use in the previous year as well as any earlier years for which records were available. At age 15, children who had taken antibiotics seven or more times during childhood weighed about three pounds (1.3 kg) more than those who received no antibiotics, the findings showed. Today, there are problems around the world with antimicrobial and antibiotic resistance, the wonder drug of yesteryear becoming inert and ineffective. Widely used in livestock as well as humans, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is so concerned that it says this is a “serious threat that is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age and in any country”. Dire warnings such as that being made by an entity such as the WHO cannot be ignored. For Pakistan and the subcontinent in general, the profligate and inappropriate use of medicines of all sorts, not only antibiotics, is rampant. Self-prescription and diagnosis are common, and over-the-counter medications poorly regulated everywhere. This is a problem which is going to be hitting Pakistan in the near future if it has not already, with as ever the very young and the very old at greatest risk. Empirical data is scarce for Pakistan but piling up elsewhere. It is estimated that half of all bacteria that cause infections post to surgery are resistant to antibiotics in the US, and one in four infections treated with antibiotics after chemotherapy are now drug-resistant. Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to wake up to this public health crisis but are years away from a solution. At the very least Pakistan needs to be alert because this problem is not going away anytime soon.
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