Is your little one gaining weight faster as compared to others who are similar in age? Check out whether he is taking antibiotics frequently, say the scientists.
A recent study has divulged that kids, who take antibiotics throughout their childhood years, put on weight much faster than the children who do not take them in childhood.
Do antibiotics have a compounding outcome on the Body Mass Index in childhood? This may be true, warn the researchers. Antibiotics taken throughout childhood years has an effect on the body mass Index, the scale to measure healthy weight in humans.
The research team leader, Brian S. Schwartz who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research, along with his team, analyzed health records of almost 163,820 children who fell between 3-18 years old and they used the Geisinger Health System’s electronic health records to study the results. The team examined the height and weight of the kids, determined their BMI, and their history of antibiotic usage in the past year and the years before that. These records of the kids antibiotic usage in the past years, was gathered from Geisinger.
Talking about the research study, Schwartz gave a statement that, “Your BMI may be forever altered by the antibiotics you take as a child”. He further suggested “Our data suggest that every time we give an antibiotic to kids they gain weight faster over time.” This showed that the kids who had been administered antibiotics 7 or more times in childhood were about 3 pounds heavier than the kids who had stayed away from the medication.
The researchers concluded this after studying the kids BMI when they reached 15 years. The researchers also discovered that almost 30,000 kids (21% of the sample of children) had taken antibiotics 7 or more times during their childhood years.
Mr. Schwartz also stated “While the magnitude of the weight increase attributable to antibiotics may be modest by the end of childhood, our finding that the effects are cumulative raises the possibility that these effects continue and are compounded into adulthood.”
Earlier also it was diagnosed that weight gain was noticed in animals who had taken penicillin and this gain in weight was put down to its by-products. Influenced by this theory, industrial farming techniques decided to introduce small antibiotic quantities to increase weight in animals, and these miniscule antibiotic doses were mixed in the animal feed.
Antibiotics are known to destroy harmful and good bacteria in the gastro-intestinal area. A constant exposure to antibiotics changes the microbiota and indirectly increase the calorie absorption making one put on weight. Details of the study can be read in “International Journal of Obesity”.
