New  research notes that parents should be extra careful when giving antibiotics to children as the medication can significantly increase the risk for Type 1 diabetes in children. So, parents should be extra careful while giving antibiotics to them.

A study   conducted on mice  found out that antibiotics changed the mix of gut microbes in their offspring and dramatically raised their risk for Type 1 diabetes.

Martin Blaser, Professor at New York University (NYU)  said that the  study begins to clarify the mechanisms by which antibiotic-driven changes in gut microbiomes may increase risk for Type 1 diabetes”. The effects of exposure to either continuous low-dose antibiotics or pulsed antibiotic therapy (PAT), which mimics the doses used to treat many infections in children.

Short pulses of antibiotics  resulted in non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice — that are more susceptible to Type 1 diabetes — to develop the condition more rapidly and more frequently than mice not exposed to antibiotics.

Specifically, male NOD mice exposed to PAT were noted to have double (53 per cent) the incidence of Type 1 diabetes as control NOD mice (26 per cent incidence) that did not receive antibiotics.

As children’s exposure to microbe-killing antibiotics has been on the rise, the incidence of autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes has more than doubled, a paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology noted. 

PAT did not significantly amplify the disease risk in female mice in one set of experiments but did increase the risk during a second set of tests.

“This is the first study of its kind suggesting that antibiotic use can alter the microbiota and have lasting effects on immunological and metabolic development, resulting in autoimmunity,” Director at Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation,  Jessica Dunne, noted (JDRF).

As children’s exposure to microbe-killing antibiotics has been on the rise, the incidence of autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes has more than doubled, a paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology noted.

The team of researchers collected samples of gut bacteria from NOD mice to determine the effects of antibiotics. Using genomic and statistical techniques, they discovered that three-week-old PAT males had a nearly complete loss in their intestines of certain bacteria shown in past studies to normally augment the immune system.