Antibiotics and the Gut Microbiome

We know that antibiotics reliably wreak havoc on the gut microbiome, but the duration of the damage has not been systematically analyzed. To study how oral antibiotics affect long-term patterns in gut flora (Figure 1), Swedish researchers analyzed fecal specimens from almost 15,000 adults enrolled in three prospective health surveillance studies. About 70% of participants received at least one course of antibiotics during the study’s 8-year duration.