Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

Interesting and potentially dangerous. But as long as many millions of pigs are covered in antibiotic foam (which is just rinsed off into the drain), I'm not gonna lie sleepless over this. Resistant bacteria will cause humanity huge troubles if we don't manage to do something radical soon.

&gt; <i>In bacteria grown in well-oxygenated laboratory conditions, the antidepressants caused the cells to generate reactive oxygen species: toxic molecules that activated the microbe’s defence mechanisms.</i> [ ... ]<p>&gt; <i>However, in bacteria grown in anaerobic conditions, levels of reactive oxygen species were much lower and antibiotic resistance developed much more slowly.</i> [ ... ]<p>&gt; <i>But in healthy humans, E. coli is found mainly in the large intestine, where conditions are anaerobic, meaning that the process described in the paper might not occur at the same rate in people, says Maier.</i><p>So the study shows that antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics if you test in oxygen-rich conditions. But that doesn&#x27;t match conditions in the human body, so this may not even be relevant to humans.<p>Their next step is to study it in mice, which makes sense, but to me it seems like you can&#x27;t conclude much right now.

Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders in the same way big oil knew that it was contributing to&#x2F;causing global warming.<p>Every person in the comments across the internet saying the rise in all of these disorders was just about self-reporting have been unknowingly shilling for big food.<p>Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.

I wonder if antidepressants protect your gut microbiome and the SSRI aspect is over stated. Would be very hard to disambiguate those two effects I suspect.

Fascinating, the idea is that by inducing a stress response bacteria are virilized in a sense.<p>It&#x27;s interesting they picked antidepressants to do so but the logic should apply to many substances people like to kill bugs<p>Like green tea and spices which hinder bacteria should also make them resistant to antibiotics.

Add to the list of nootropics that are possibly universal.<p>It&#x27;s like discovering that some plant derived psychiatric drugs are behavior modifiers for the plants too<p>The suggestion that mental process begins at the cellular level.

Is there any way that this could be how they help with depression - there’s a lot of research now about various good bacteria affecting your mental well being - and we are living in a soup of antibiotics

Their dna sees our over=stressed modern lifestyles as an opportunity. shouldn&#x27;t surprise us i guess.

How is something 3 or 4 on the front page here thats been known since the 40s?

Probably helps the bugs deal with their existential dread of trying to do battle inside of a body doped to kill them.

I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary.<p>My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall.<p>Sure, bacteria may develop where the mechanism works a bit differently and is not affected by a certain chemical. But it seems like “disrupt cell wall production” is a huge target and we could probably disrupt it in many other ways. Humans lack a cell wall entirely, so we “just” need to avoid side effects in some other system.<p>Is the concern that studies to confirm lack of effects will take too long? Not that it’s a difficult engineering challenge? Couldn’t we be doing this research already, of finding other ways to disrupt the mechanism?

This seems a really week connection.<p>&gt; In bacteria grown in well-oxygenated laboratory conditions, the antidepressants caused the cells to generate reactive oxygen species: toxic molecules that activated the microbe’s defence mechanisms. Most prominently, this activated the bacteria’s efflux pump systems, a general expulsion system that many bacteria use to eliminate various molecules, including antibiotics. This probably explains how the bacteria could withstand the antibiotics without having specific resistance genes.<p>So the study was:<p>* Done in a petri dish<p>* Done in an environment dissimilar to the human body<p>* Showed an adaptation to the environment unrelated to antibiotic resistance<p>Showing adaptation &quot;efflux pumps&quot; for oxygen removal and claiming it&#x27;s applicable to antibiotics seems like claiming yoga mats are made from jet fuel because they both contain water.<p>It would be really interesting if they tested a null here which I don&#x27;t see noted anywhere. If the adaptation happened in the oxygen rich environment without the antibiotic it would indicate that antibiotics are not causal.