Childhood antibiotics as a risk factor for Crohn's disease: Cohort study
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917019/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuterin
This has been my entire experience with gastroenterology as a field. Once they rule out cancer there's really not much they can do for you. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the revolution in our understanding of the microbiome.
My philosophy is try what the doctors say and if that doesn’t work it’s time to expand your search space. Like troubleshooting code.
They’re both available OTC. Read the labels before using :).
You could also try seeing an ENT.
I do worry that with Chloraseptic I'm treating the symptom but not identifying and mitigating whatever the cause is, but I might try it to help keep me from throwing up! My wife recommended it the other day but I dismissed her out of hand. I really should listen to her more.
I’ve lost 80 pounds before doing elimination, then 60 the last time (if I go back to SAD, I gain weight again).
Today I took Mucinex and Flonase and Xyzal, and haven’t thrown up yet. But there’s definitely some sort of food that I’m eating that exacerbates whatever is already happening. Thanks for the advice.
So doing a search for "Reuteri" on Amazon, I immediately see several pages worth of supplements, with such helpful reviews as "HELPS DIGESTION. ENLARGES TESTICLES."[0]
How do you separate the trustworthy supplements from the snake oil?
Amazon is so full of scams, Jeff Bezos really needs to be held to account for that.
Which supplement from them are you referring to?
[1] https://www.biogaia.com/product-country/biogaia-protectis-ch...
We have actually recently stopped using protectis in this way as the evidence base is too thin to justify the cost, but suffice to say that the Biogaia protectis is sufficiently genuine to be prescribed in UK hospitals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/9pdrg1/my_expe...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/m3ywju/questio...
There are more but just linking these two.
You'd probably be better off reading such reddit forums, and presuming the exact opposite happens.
This is another area to clean up, in the digital age.
Both of those posts have the OP linking to specific products, with one of the OPs blatantly posting a referral link to a specific product.
Even without the links or mentioning specific products or brands, marketers will post things like this to build up markets, audiences and anticipation for new products, in this case it is a specific species and variant of bacteria.
I see what you did there.
Yes its shitty chumbucket type marketing but there's still some potential.
The testes thing is… I guess vaguely plausible. I’m bemused everyone in the reviews seems to be confident that this is desirable. It seems like desperate people are just flocking to some study on rats.
For example, pretty much every bottle of probiotics you buy will claim it contains "Over XX billion CFUs (colony-forming units?) in every pill!" But, are more better? Are they the right kind? Will I get 60 billion CFUs in a pill if I just dehydrate some pond water?
Oddly enough, with the food/supplement I'm most familiar with, kava, the worst quality you can find is in brick and mortar establishments. The trusted vendors are all online-only and dedicated entirely to the one product instead of just trying to stock their shelves with every supplement on the planet.
As for food safety, the standards are the same whether manufactured in the US or outside. The FDA ensures they comply with HARPC and are made in cGMP facilities.
Then just consume the yogurt regularly.
Not sure if anyone has ever tried anything like that..
Denaturing is a plus for making a yoghurt, and the high temperature also further removes bacteria that may spoil the yoghurt. It also means you don't need to go through the initial heating portion of most recipes and go straight to the fermentation phase at a lower temperature.
I’m assuming we can just add this to our culture and not make yogurt using just this, but I guess that will require some experimentation.
It’s easy to confuse.
I just finished making 2 liters of yogurt with this bacterium this morning.
How long until you saw results ?
I buy a box every now and then since then just to keep it up. It's like the most expensive probiotic on the shelf, but it works.
Oh yeah, and I also stopped consuming crap that goes in the fridge or freezer ready to eat a long long time ago. I think that might have something to do with it. They found that there's certain harmful bacterial species which proliferate in such environments [1]
[1] https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-bacteria-grow-in-the-refr...
It sounds horrible, I'm sorry that happened to you.
What's fun to do in that region is waking up early to take one of the speedboats that drops you off on cayes zapatillas, which are these small islands you can walk around in around 20 minutes. Make sure to bring water and wear sunscreen of course, but you get to feel like you're on a treasure island for a day and there's good snorkeling/diving reefs around there as well.
https://drformulas.com/blogs/news/probiotic-milk-test-how-do...
"Subgroup analysis showed that antibiotic use <18 years old was a risk factor for CD development in the Chinese (adjusted OR 4.80, 95% CI 1.62–12.24; P = 0.005) but not in Australian populations (OR 1.80, 95% CI 0.33–9.95; P = 0.498)."
If it were a robust finding, it would not fall apart on subgroup analysis.
There was a study that found 7% of doctors reported adverse reactions. Some were scared, some didn’t know how, some didn’t have time. Some doctors made no reports in nearly lifetime of practice.
When I was 16-22 I had multiple 6+ months courses of doxycycline for acne. I have seen multiple dermatologist who said nothing can be done about my cystic acne. At some point I was tired of doxy making me feel awful so I researched different skin types and skin care routines. As long as I use a mild soap twice a day, use a moisturizer and don’t touch my skin I get 0 cystic acne but it took weeks to see the results. No doctor ever told me about different types of skin and I was young and dumb. My parents didn’t know any better. And internet wasn’t as popular back then.
Then, I got an adverse reaction to cipro. And 40+ doctors ignored it. Told me it’s all in my head. Told me to seek help for my mental health and depression. Later FDA added warning about permanent nerve damage. I still have to send studies to doctors because they try to tell me I’m wrong, after I had every test under the sun to rule out other causes.
I help admin flouroquinolone toxicity group and every day we get individuals who were given these last resort meds for suspected infection. It is border line medical malpractice. However, I have seen that it is impossible to find a lawyer to take the case and find a physician willing to testify.
There needs to be a better system for tracking allergic reactions and trends. For example, cipro might show no reaction up to 6 months. Then, you snap your Achilles. The doctor won’t tell you it was cipro unless you tell him. It’s fucked and extremely underreported.
I also had the displeasure of suffering from the mental side effects of the antiallergic montelukast, which again were not even mentioned by the doctor despite the serious FDA warning.
However, every physician should be able to present patient with different options and risks. It simply is not happening. Some antibiotics carry smaller risks than flouroquinolones as this drug belongs to topoisomare II inhibitors along with chemo drugs. Some reactions we are seeing are much like damage from chemo. However, the action of damage is still very poorly understood. There is some research on mitochondrial dna damage and adducts.
There recently has been talk if flouroquinolone antibiotics could be a potential cancer treatment even.
If I knew I would never touch this antibiotic unless on my death bed.
I've asked a few pharmacists about this and the usually say they know it is bad but it is what people expect -- the more pills they get, the more effective they think the treatment will be. If you don't hand out as many pills as the pharmacy down the road then you'll lose customers and go out of business. So it is a race to the bottom tragedy of the commons kind of market failure that can only really be fixed with effective government regulation. Which isn't easy in a developing country, to say the least.
My partner is a GP and doctors need to justify antibiotic prescriptions ver specifically. It means that Sweden is still using many "old" antibiotics which are not used in most other European countries anymore due to high resistance there.
Doctors are well aware by my talks with them. There is unfortunately a large subset of the population that unless prescribed antibiotics feel that they have not been taken care by the doctor. So there is quite a demand.
A central authority administering truth to the greater unwashed mass is the popular method.
And it seems to be built into us, to get our truth that way. Truth is what the authority tells us. Contriving truth yourself is generally considered a perversion.
So there's that inertia, keeping the knowledge management system stuck this way.
Maybe high-quality society-wide pervasive knowledge is impossible.
That's not to say you can't have some recovery and adapt, just that what you were before is never coming back.
I developed diastolic dysfunction and severe sensitivities and food intolerances after Cipro and other antibiotics in 2014. The only way there could be a persistent diastolic dysfunction is if there has been permanent damage to the cells of the heart.
If he has input as to things which helped him I'd love to see, but as far as I understand, if the mechanism is indeed mtdna depletion and mutagenesis from excessive ROS then I don't really see how you actually cure that.
I know that aortic aneurysms is a common side effect.
There is variety of supplements one can take.
There is a physician in Germany Dr. Stefan Piper who published a book on it. He goes over possible therapies. Tendonitis usually gets manageable. Neurological symptoms are the ones that are more difficult to treat.
Some people report success with high dose thiamine, but high dose thiamine has been helpful in fibro and small fiber neuropathy along with alpha lipoic acid. Anti depressants can be also used to manage symptoms.
Some people reported resolution with pirenzepine. There is a drug company putting pirenzepine in a cream to treat nerve damage. That is currently in trials. I think the company is called WinSanTor.
My condition has improved but I still cycle. I’m taking antioxidants and other supplements that support mitochondria.
There is a sticky thread on reddit r/floxies, that discuss some of the supplements used and reasoning behind them.
With my heart we have echocardiograms from before and after the antibiotics and it went from normal with good parameters to abnormal with questionable parameters. Things like E/A reversal, a large increase in deceleration time, and a significant decrease in mitral valve bloodflow velocities. These are tell-tale signs that your heart is starting to struggle that usually aren't seen until like middle aged diabetics or later on for non-diabetics. But I'm 32, and previously above average fitness.
Likewise the food sensitivity reactions are mostly diagnosis by symptoms. I've had a mild elevation in tryptase during a reaction but everything else has largely been normal.
I used to take supplements but they never really seemed to do much. When I took things I needed because of malnutrition there were improvements but that was about it. Subjectively I would say I felt more energetic while on B complex and L-Carnitine but I eventually developed a sensitivity to those medications, as I do with anything I continually intake, because my immune system's mechanism of tolerance has been disrupted by the antibiotics (and maybe something genetic who knows).
I actually have spoken with a guy who got extremely sick after flouroquinolones and after taking antihistamines for a few weeks he went completely back to normal.
Your tryptase could be a sign of mcas. I would definitely explore if it seems like you are getting an allergic reactions to foods and things.
Not ignorant, complicit.
We don't know what ideal microbiomes look like, we just know the bulk of people living in the western world have unhealthy ones that are missing key species and we have only scratched the surface of understanding.
Amniotic fluid and blood is sterile.
Newborns acquire their biome once born by ingesting various food and contact from family members.
There are no bacteria in the womb.
Yes, the baby would be ingesting all sorts of stuff during the normal birthing process.
In a related note - families tend to have very similar biomes. Oral-fecal transmission happens despite the highest level of cleanliness.
The fact is we do not understand the complete mechanisms of either Crohn's or IBS, but based on their presentation and treatment it is unlikely they are too closely related - and it is likely that IBS is itself due to multiple factors - hence it is a syndrome, not a disease.
Given this, it is hogwash to say all of any kind of condition is caused by one thing. And if there was a cure with 95% effectiveness, I am sure many of the affluent IBS sufferers on this site would have figured it out by now.
> and the cure rate for fecal bacteriotherapy is about 95% in one shot. It's ludicrous that we're still studying this and acting as though it's such a mystery.
This is crackpottery.
In some cases they are miracle cure, with some nasty side effects. But general over-prescription even in relatively developed world is ridiculous.
From my less developed and highly corrupt home (Slovakia/Czech republic), I often get news from friends who got prescribed full course of antibiotics on clearly viral infections. General doctors there are mostly on such an abysmal level that self-treatment is sometimes better than their clueless visits. Even for small kids.
Another item are painkillers - I see prescriptions for literally anything, usually heavy doses of paracetamol or ibuprofen but I've seen worse for maladies which don't warrant it. I don't even take those in pharmacies unless I know I have acute inflammation to treat.
My doctor is obese and diabetic. Great doctor, wonderful person, but dang!
There's a disconnect there.
Those that grow up with dogs may be less likely to develop Crohn's. Dogs have been shown to increase the strength of a child's immune system.
A bottle of kefir is unlikely to hurt. However, I am quite skeptical that such a thing has any prophylactic effect once a recurrent process like Crohn's is set in motion - like pissing on a gasoline fire. A bottle of kefir is not going to touch an actual Crohn's flare at all.
There's no good evidence that any specific diets seem to help the chronic course of Crohn's unfortunately, and it's not like no one has looked.
I blame both on excessive use of antibiotics as a 5 - 8 yr old.
I walked on my tippy toes for example, and lost flexibility in my ankles. Rather than, you know, stretch and exercise my ankles… My Achilles’ tendons were cut and stretched, then I was in casts with my ankles extended for quite a while.
Nothing was really physically wrong, I was just a weird kid.
Western medicine is both miraculous and barbaric
My brother toe walks and they just let him walk.
Anecdata: Root canal, antibiotics, and first Crohns indications in the span of 10 days for me.
Medical failure in the literature is a jargon term. (Internal) medicine and surgery are traditionally two distinct fields of, er, medicine. So it is just a matter of fact that a disease such as Crohn's that is refractory or resistant to treatment with medicine is a "medical failure" - no spin on it, that's what we call it.
Biases in referral across services is a complicated topic, and there is quite a bit of literature about it over the years. I am not sure about Crohn's/IBD specifically, but it's one of the well known co-management touch-points between surgery and GI, so there might be something written on the subject. There are many complexities at play here, some is definitely due to human factors, but the simple thought of "medical failure" doesn't have much to do with it. The average internists make thousands of consults to surgery every year, so that's really not it, there's much more to it.
Speaking of complexities, I'm fairly sure the GI who did not refer me was married -- so he told me I'm 98% sure -- to a pharmaceutical salesperson who sold GI related infusions (and he got me in a perhaps unrelated study). There were other manner-related problems. .. Does not change my profound regard for MDs in general. (Have worked with MD/PhDs, wouldn't be alive without some interventions, very dedicated care, etc.) Be well.
Ear infections are dangerous. My nurse friend decided she didn’t need to go to a doctor for her ear pain (nurse knows best). A few days later two burst eardrums, blood running from ears. Fixing ear infections without losing hearing ability is a wonder of modern science. Good parents don’t risk their children going deaf.
The answer to bad doctors is not “don’t go to the doctor”.
The answer is to go to a good doctor.
It takes time and effort to find a good doctor. Worth the investment since health risks are very high expected personal costs. Or you are spending X% of your salary on health insurance, so the implication is that you should invest significant time and effort to get a good doctor.
Same with house purchases: treat that like a fucking degree you must learn, otherwise you are just gambling with quality years of your life (the extra years you work to buy a bad decision, the quality of life of the years you spend living on a property).
Either learn doctor and property knowledge (if you have the capacity to do so), or learn how to choose the right people to help you. Anything else is rolling the dice with your life and the lives of those you care for.
That was the last sentence I wrote: I am explicitly saying to learn as much as reasonable and implicitly saying not to blindly trust doctors where possible. You appear to be avoiding answering the points I made and appear to have misunderstood what I wrote.
> ability to battle with the insurance companies
You are assuming I am in the USA: I am not. The USA health system is uniquely broken, and New Zealander’s don’t have the same problems that American’s have.
Xylitol nose spray can help along with a humidifier and rubbing behind the ear to sort of try and disrupt the biofilm colonies.
Anecdotally I've also had great success with a supplement called X-INFX (and I've tried quite a bit including various antibiotics to no avail).
As far as preventative measures, keeping the inner ear dry with a quick dab of toilet paper or a little ear dryer pump goes a long ways.
It also helps if you get an ear cleaner, just in case you have hardened wax. For whatever reason, an ear infection sometimes causes wax to build up inside (which is a like a sticky conveyor belt your body uses to "churn" out debris and pathogens).
I make no judgement about whether or not to use antibiotics since that's not my expertise and I'm not a doctor. I'm just simply offering adjunct treatments that have historically worked for me and others.
Best of luck everyone.
Crohn's et al is important, but this study adds little more than noise.
And that sample size is pretty good considering the low incidence of Crohn's in general and the fact that study participants had to be sought out and recruited.
At low prevalence probabilities, odd ratios are more or less just multipliers on the prevalence probability.
So if there is a 0.1% probability of developing Crohn's without childhood antibiotics, an odds ratio of 3.5 would mean that there is approximately an 0.35% probability of developing Crohn's with childhood antibiotics. That's 100 in 100k vs. 350 in 100k, and in my opinion that's not a small difference.
More generally, an odds ratio is the ratio of the odds of something under two different sets of circumstances.