The Resistance Issue
It’s well known that using antibiotics unnecessarily drives bacteria to change and can lead to antibiotic resistance developing. But people tend to think that resistance only occurs in people who use antibiotics too frequently, for too long, or in those patients with other medical conditions that make them sicker. This isn’t true.
Taking any antibiotic (whether appropriate or not) makes developing antibiotic resistance more likely. As our research shows, even relatively low antibiotic use has potential health implications and brings home the impact of unnecessary antibiotic use in children. And when you consider that many preschool children often have multiple illness episodes, potentially leading to several antibiotic courses, it makes the findings even more pertinent.
At this stage, it is impossible to say for sure why children who have taken more antibiotics show a greater chance of not responding to subsequent treatments.
Long-Term Changes
Of course, doctors want to provide the best care possible for their patients. But they grapple with the decision to prescribe an antibiotic—thereby lowering an individual patient’s risk of coming to harm—versus not prescribing it, and lowering community risk.
This decision isn’t always straightforward. And when uncertain, clinicians often err on the side of caution and prescribe. But our study found that children who received more antibiotics were also more likely to revisit a health professional within a 14-day period—which inadvertently will have increased the workload of doctors and nurses.
Given that our findings show that even relatively low antibiotic use has short-term health implications for children, it is clear that the less doctors are prescribing antibiotics in such instances, the better. But this isn’t just on doctors and nurses, parents also need to be realistic about how long their child’s illness might last.