By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON – Antibiotics can temporarily upset your stomach, but now it turns out that repeatedly taking them can trigger long-lasting changes in all those good germs that live in your gut, raising questions about lingering ill effects.
Nobody yet knows if that leads to later health problems. But the finding is the latest in a flurry of research raising questions about how the customized bacterial zoo that thrives in our intestines forms – and whether the wrong type or amount plays a role in ailments from obesity to inflammatory bowel disease to asthma.
Don’t be grossed out: This is a story in part about, well, poop. Three healthy adults collected weeks of stool samples so that scientists could count exactly how two separate rounds of a fairly mild antibiotic caused a surprising population shift in their microbial netherworld – as some original families of germs plummeted and other types moved in to fill the gap.