Could early life antibiotic use be associated with chronic disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Early in life antibiotic use may disrupt the microbiome in children and lead to long term health consequences, and this is one of medicine’s blind spots. That’s according to Johns Hopkins surgeon and public health researcher Marty Makary, in his new book called Blind Spots.

A recent study found that when a child takes an antibiotic in their first few years of life they have massively higher rates of obesity, learning disabilities, asthma and celiac. Now all of those chronic diseases have been going up and we scratch our heads in medicine to say why. Well it may be that some of the food and toxic exposures and the ways in which we alter the microbiome from antibiotics and C sections may be playing a role in the rise of all these chronic diseases.   :30

Rising rates of C-sections are implicated because newborns aren’t colonized with their mom’s bacteria as they are in vaginal deliveries, Makary says, and notes more research is needed to understand the role of the microbiome in health. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.