Antibiotics are a double-edged sword: on the one hand, antibiotics are essential to curing bacterial infections.
On the other, their use promotes the appearance and proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In a new study from Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, researchers used genomic sequencing techniques and machine learning to analyze patient records.
They then developed an antibiotic prescribing algorithm that cuts the risk of emergence of antibiotic resistance by half.
The study focused on two very common bacterial infections, urinary tract infections, and wound infections.
They reported how each patient’s past infection history can be used to choose the best antibiotic to prescribe them to reduce the chances of antibiotic resistance emerging.
Clinical treatment of infections focuses on correctly matching an antibiotic to the resistance profile of the pathogen, but even such correctly matched treatments can fail as resistance can emergence during the treatment itself.
The key to the success of the approach was understanding that the emergence of antibiotic resistance could be predicted in individual patients’ infections.
Bacteria can evolve by randomly acquiring mutations that make them resistant, but the randomness of the process makes it hard to predict and to avoid.
However, the researchers discovered that in most patients’ infections resistance was not acquired by random mutations.
Instead, resistance emerged due to reinfection by existing resistant bacteria from the patient’s own microbiome.
The researchers turned these findings into an advantage: they proposed matching an antibiotic not only to the susceptibility of the bacteria causing the patient’s current infection but also to the bacteria in their microbiome that could replace it.
The team says they found that the antibiotic susceptibility of the patient’s past infections could be used to predict their risk of returning with a resistant infection following antibiotic treatment.
If you care about antibiotics, please read studies that yogurt may prevent diarrhea caused by antibiotics, and these common antibiotics linked to higher colon cancer risk.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about common high blood pressure drug that may prevent COVID-19 complication, and results showing this pain reliever linked to hip fracture in old people.
The study is published in Science and was conducted by Professor Roy Kishony et al.
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