The health of those who take antibiotics counts: diabetes could be a factor still little considered of spreading antibiotic-resistance.
In the complex framework of factors that feed the phenomenon of resistance to antibiotics, at the top of the concerns for global public health, there is one that we had not yet considered. Type 2 diabetes mellitus, the form that represents 90% of diabetes cases, seems to provide bacteria with the ideal context to evolve and maintain dangerous mutations. Following this reasoning, and as a research published on Science Advances, fight antibiotic resistance in diabetic patients It could have positive consequences on a systemic level.
Abundance of food and no obstacles. According to the authors of the study, a team of microbiologists from the School of Medicine of the University of North Carolina, people with diabetes are more likely to develop resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureusthe bacterium that causes more infections and antibiotic-resistance deaths.
Diabetes affects the body’s ability to control glucose and often determines an excess of glucose in the blood; Staffilococcus feeds on sugars and uses this energy to reproduce more quickly, increasing the chances of developing advantageous mutations. In addition, diabetes damages the ability of the immune system to fight infections.
Diffusion without control. If the Staffilococcus manages to establish itself in an organism with diabetes and proliferating, any compared to stress factors (such as the introduction of an antibiotic) become prevalent in the bacterial population, because the resistant strain can use glucose supplies to feed its rapid diffusion. “And there is no immune system to eliminate the mutant, which takes over the entire bacterial population within a few days,” adds Lance Thurlow, among the authors of the study.
Test tests. The researchers divided mice with an infection to the skin and soft tissues in two groups, one of which has received a compound capable of selectively eliminating some pancreas cells that produce insulin, thus becoming diabetic.
Scientists infected both rodents groups with S. Aureus And they then administered the antibiotic rifampicin to the animals. After 5 days, The antibiotic had practically no effect in diabetic micein which more than a hundred millions of rifampicin resistant bacteria were present. Instead, there were no diabetic mice.
Subsequent experiments, in which both groups of mice were provided S. Aureus which included a well -known number of refampicin -resistant specimens, showed how the latter they were able to prevail in a few days on non -resistant bacteria in diabetic mice; while in the non -diabetic ones they remained in the minority.
A cure, two results. Luckily the administration of insulin Diabetic mice has made it possible to decrease glucose stocks and hungry the resistant bacteria, which remained in low numbers: the hypothesis is that a correct management of diabetes mellitus, whose diagnosis is often late, can also help against the phenomena of resistance to antibiotics.
