In a new study from the University of Cambridge, researchers found common medications can accumulate in gut bacteria, a new study has found, altering bacterial function and potentially reducing the effectiveness of the drug.
These interactions—seen for a variety of medications, such as depression, diabetes, and asthma drugs—could help researchers to better understand individual differences in drug effectiveness and side effects.
It is known that bacteria can chemically modify some drugs, a process known as biotransformation.
In the study, the team found that certain species of gut bacteria accumulate human drugs, altering the types of bacteria and their activity.
This could change the effectiveness of the drug both directly, as the accumulation could reduce the availability of the drug to the body, and indirectly, as altered bacterial function and composition could be linked to side effects.
The human gut naturally contains communities of hundreds of different species of bacteria, which are important in health and disease, called the gut microbiome.
The composition of bacterial species varies strongly between people and has previously been shown to be associated with a wide range of conditions including obesity, immune response, and mental health.
In this study, the researchers grew 25 common gut bacteria and studied how they interacted with 15 drugs that are taken orally.
The drugs were chosen to represent a range of different types of common drugs, including antidepressant medications, which are known to affect individuals dissimilarly and cause side effects such as gut problems and weight gain.
The researchers tested how each of the 15 drugs interacted with the selected bacterial strains—a total of 375 bacteria-drug tests.
They found 70 interactions between the bacteria and the drugs studied—of which 29 had not been previously reported.
It was surprising that the majority of the new interactions we saw between bacteria and drugs were the drugs accumulating in the bacteria.
The team says these will likely be very personal differences between individuals, depending on the composition of their gut microbiota.
This study calls for researchers to start treating the microbiome as one of the body organs.
If you care about gut health, please read studies about big cause of leaky gut, fatty liver disease,
and findings of common blood pressure drug that may increase your gut disease risk.
For more information about gut health, please see recent studies about diet that can reduce inflammation, improve gut health, and results showing that ‘gut bugs’ can drive prostate cancer growth.
The study is published in Nature. One author of the study is Dr. Kiran Patil.
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