Bacteria in the gut may accumulate medications

Everyone knows that side effects cannister occur when you are taking medication. In general, the benefits tend to outweigh them. What has now been discovered is that drugs probably interact with the gut microbiome - that is, with the entire population of bacteria that live in the instinctive .

In a study recently published in Countryside, scientists found that many species of bacteria that live in the human gut can interact and accumulate different types of drugs, such as antidepressants, painkillers and heart drugs, among others. "We need to start treating the microbiome as one of our organs," says one of the study's authors, bioinformatician Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Workroom (EMBL) in Deutschland .

Scientists already knew that bacteria in the anthropological microbiome have the ability to chemically modify the drugs they come in contact with in the body, a wonder called biotransformation. The novelty is that these bacteria end up accumulating chemicals unexpectedly, without changing them .

According to researchers, bioaccumulated drugs can not only alter bacterial behavior and metabolic processes, but can also affect the distribution and equilibrium of bacterial populations. In other words, the drugs would probably have unknown effects on the intestinal microbiome and its general structure if the results were reproduced in real human patients, which has not yet been done. The experiment worked with more than twenty human intestinal bacteria and 15 drugs .

 

"It is likely that there are very personal differences between individuals, depending on the composition of the intestinal microbiota," says Kiran Patil, research director of the MRC toxicology unit at Cambridge University. "We've seen differences even between different strains of the same species of bacteria ."

In addition to the effect that drugs can have on our intestinal microbiome, the researchers raised a second significant point: if intestinal bacteria sequester certain amounts of chemicals, the drugs may be less effective. After all, when prescribing doses of drugs, it is not considered that the bacteria will take some of them.

And, finally and deriving from the above, it is possible that the same phenomenon of drug confiscation may introduce or affect side effects in patients.

More research is needed to comprehend the real importance of this bacterial accumulation problem. The next steps will be to advance this basic molecular research and study how an individual's intestinal bacteria relate to different individual responses to medications, such as antidepressants: differences in response, required dose of medication, and side effects such as antidepressants. Weight gain, "explains Patil.