Evidence Hub

1773. Impact of Antibiotics Used to Treat Community Acquired Pneumonia on the Gut Microbiome and Resistome in Healthy Volunteers

Winston E. Anthony, Bin Wang, Candice Cass, T. Hink, K. Reske, Sondra M. Seiler, E. Dubberke, C. Burnham et al.

Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 2018

Abstract

Abstract Background Antibiotics (ABX) are frequently inappropriately used to treat nonbacterial causes of respiratory illnesses. The goal of this prospective cohort study was to characterize the impact of ABX used to treat community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) on the fecal microbiome and resistome in healthy volunteers (HV). Methods Twenty HVs were randomized to receive 5 days of levofloxacin (LV), azithromycin (AZ), cefpodoxime (CF), or AZ+CF. Stool was collected before, during, and after ABX, then underwent microbiologic culture and shotgun sequencing. DNA was extracted, then sequenced using the Illumina NextSeq platform. Relative abundance of bacterial taxa was estimated by MetaPhlAn and antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) composition by ShortBRED. Analysis was in R. Results The mean HV age was 37 (range 24–59) and 10 were female. Species diversity measured via Shannon Index and richness were significantly lower in samples taken from all HVs 3 days post-ABX (P < 0.01 for all). While nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NDMS) ordination shows high interpatient dissimilarity (Bray–Curtis) for most samples, the post-ABX intrapatient dissimilarity varies by ABX. The AZ group exhibited chronic alterations in taxa dissimilarity and the CF group had increases in dissimilarity directly post-ABX. The CF+AZ group displayed both acute and persistent perturbations (Figure 1). Although there was no significant change in ARG richness post-ABX, there was a significant increase in overall ARG…

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Evidence Hub reads this as a randomized trial, done in people. Its evidence level is 2 of 5 (High · randomized trial). Randomized trials of a reasonable size are the strongest single-study design.

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