What happens to the good bacteria if we take antibiotics?
In: Biology
The same thing that happens to bad bacteria. Think of antibiotics like a drone strike or nuke. The bad guy dies, and so do all of her good guy friends.
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The majority of posts in this thread are misleading. It is most certainly NOT so simple as other people have made it to be. This is the purview of the discipline of pharmacokinetics, which is extremely complicated.
Your gut flora exist in your intestines (primarily lower) which are typically not accessed until passage through your liver and then systemic circulation in your body.
Antibiotics are prescribed to tackle a specific infection in a specific area- for example an upper respiratory infection. Although the targeting is not perfect, the majority of the drug is intended to spend its lifetime in the area of infection, until it gets degraded, metabolized, or excreted. So that is one manner of control drug-makers have is formulating the pill such that the drug itself exists primarily in the area of effect.
Also, your gut flora are many, diverse, and can exist in super structures such as bio films. All of these things can help them withstand antibiotics over a new colony formed in your body (the infection you’re trying to treat). In addition, the antibiotic you’ve been given may be specific to the infection you have and this will not target some or even all of your gut flora.
Basically, it’s a complicated process. Bacteria are super resilient and it’s likely some of your microbiome survives the dosage of common antibiotics.
That being said, eating fermented foods is good and everyone should do that several times a week!
Others have answered this fine, but I wanted to add:
There aren’t “good” bacteria or “bad bacteria.” There are just bacteria, some that have greater or lesser potential to cause disease. Bacteria can respond to their environment and can “decide” to peacefully coexist with you or to attack you, depending on what strategy they determine is more likely to keep them happy and fed.
Eg, many, many people are colonized with MRSA which can cause serious disease but usually doesn’t. Part of your immune system’s job is to manage all the different species to kill bad actors and to placate the rest so you have a happy, functional gut.
The appendix apparently helps here – it’s connected to the gut but unlike most of it which is a straight through pipe is a blind ended tube. Not much of the food (or antibiotics) going through your gut ends up in there so the bacteria there serve as a resevoir for normal gut bacteria which repopulate the gut.
Certainly researchers discovered that if your appendix is removed you are far more likely to get a reoccurance of c-diff.
People here talking about taking probiotics to repopulate their gut microbiome need to know how laughably trivial the amount of live cultures there are in products such as yogurt. It’s essentially marketing hype over a hot button topic and those companies are profiting off of misinformation.
It depends on the antibiotic.
Some bacteria have certain mechanisms and identifiers that sperate them from other bacteria. We have developed antibiotics that can target specific strains/species of bacteria with minimal inference to the “good” bacteria.
When the causative agent is unknown, generalist “air strike” antibiotics are given.
Look up “Beta-Lactam Ring” to see more about how this specific type of antibiotic interferes with bacteria growth.
Source: nursing major
I’m just paraphrasing a lot of what was taught in my clinical microbiology class. Hopefully someone else can give a more in depth, nuanced example besides “air strike”.
Edit: bacteria exists all over your body. On your skin, inside your nose, on your scalp, etc. Although your gut microbiome is important, it is not the only one.
Good gut bacteria can also be flushed out by diarrhea. For decades doctors thought the appendix was useless but we now know that the appendix stores a reservoir of good gut bacteria that is used to replenish your gut after diarrhea. I imagine antibiotics kills good gut bacteria in your appendix too. In fact that is now how they treat appendicitis bc they no longer remove it (unless they have to).
So general speaking, it depends on the type of antibiotics. Some antibiotics are what they call broad spectrum antibiotics. This mean they are like a big bomb that seeks to destroy everything. It’s really good at killing lots of bacteria of different types, so it’s used a fair bit. Generally in hospitals, doctors begin with broad spectrum antibiotics while they wait for cultures (identity tests) to come back that tell them what they are fighting and what it’s weak to. Then they can use more specific antibiotics to fight things. That said, all antibiotics can change/kill the populations of bacteria in your body. This is why antibiotics can cause yeast infections, thrush, and infections like C-Diff. When healthy bacteria is killed off, the organisms that survive don’t have much competition and can go wild. So if we’re talking mouth or vagina, the yeast in those places can “go wild”… so in case of your mouth, it can cause redness, irritation, white furry tongue from yeast. In terms of your bowels, it can cause diarrhea when things are unbalanced, and C-Diff, or Clostridium Difficile is a bacteria that can become an opportunistic infection, where your normal gut bacteria isn’t there to compete, and it causes severe diarrhea as well, that often requires specific antibiotics to treat, or even fecal transplants. (Transplants of healthy donor stool (poo) )
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