12 ms·

Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

311 points by charlieirish 4y ago

malfist 4y ago
This seems a really week connection. > 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. So the study was: * Done in a petri dish * Done in an environment dissimilar to the human body * Showed an adaptation to the environment unrelated to antibiotic resistance Showing adaptation "efflux pumps" for oxygen removal and claiming it's applicable to antibiotics seems like claiming yoga mats are made from jet fuel because they both contain water. It would be really interesting if they tested a null here which I don't see noted anywhere. If the adaptation happened in the oxygen rich environment without the antibiotic it would indicate that antibiotics are not causal.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  It seems the mechanism is general enough that green tea, spices that are lauded for harming bacteria might be making them more virulent
- cratermoon 4y ago
  This article mentions that a study was done in humans and found no effect. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-01-24/study-suggests-use-of-antidepressants-generates-resistance-to-antibiotics.html https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-01-24/study-sug...
peteradio 4y ago
Probably helps the bugs deal with their existential dread of trying to do battle inside of a body doped to kill them.
krautt 4y ago
Their dna sees our over=stressed modern lifestyles as an opportunity. shouldn't surprise us i guess.
tokai 4y ago
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.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  The answer is phages. But last time I went into the rabbit hole the TLDR was that it is not patentable so there's no money in it. And everyone needs a different phages cocktail. I sleep at night knowing that push come to shove someone will step in and mass produce machines to create personal phage cocktails.
  - efields 4y ago
    Is the implication here that antibiotics are more commercially viable, but phages are the real solution? I'm unfamiliar with phages, but a quick lookup revealed "virus that eats bacteria" and it's like, yeah… let's do that to combat bacterial infections. I'm guessing alignment between phage/bacteria is crucial.
    - stackbutterflow 4y ago
      Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but what I got was that there's nothing to patent because phages are found in sewers and mud pools as is. Also every individual with a bacterial infection needs a custom cocktail so there's no one-size-fits-all pill that can be mass produced. Phages also have their own caveats but I don't remember what it is. The TLDR is that in the worst case scenario we still have phages and as far as I understand no bacteria can adapt to phages. But we need to figure out a way to make it commercially viable as you put it.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        As someone who knows nothing about biology, this as well as the limited shelf-life issue mentioned in other comments makes me wonder if something like “A collection of less specialized phages and a process by which they can be quickly programmed to go after a bacteria” could be patented. I’m sure this is dumb because if it wasn’t somebody would have done it by now, though.
psychphysic 4y ago
Fascinating, the idea is that by inducing a stress response bacteria are virilized in a sense. It's interesting they picked antidepressants to do so but the logic should apply to many substances people like to kill bugs Like green tea and spices which hinder bacteria should also make them resistant to antibiotics.
andy_ppp 4y ago
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.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Yeah the gut microbiome is the next big thing for sure. It should be easy to study. Food logs, mood logs, medication logs, next generation sequencing and maybe some metabolic profiling and we should be able to find interesting correlations. I know my mood changes drastically down when I fail to eat properly for a period of time.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    As if omics research isn't hard enough, there's a confounding layer of privacy and incentive problems here. From a science angle it makes more sense to just collect this data from everybody all the time and let the studies be post hoc explorations of that giant dataset. But how do you get people to cooperate when they have reason to believe that the data will be used against them? Either we accept the diminished value of isolated study-at-a-time datasets (as we're doing now), we figure out how to do this kind of research through a layer of homeomorphic encryption which the layman trusts (a tall order), or we wait for an era with more trustworthy institutions (potentially a long time). For this reason, I think it'll be like fusion power: the perpetual "next big thing".
    - Pilottwave 4y ago
      give out equity to the study participants. I'll hand over data of you give me some equity on future ideas built on that data. l Like artists getting payed royalties.
  - John23832 4y ago
    > Yeah the gut microbiome is the next big thing for sure. It should be easy to study. It won't be. We aren't able to culture most gut bacteria. Most die immediately in oxygen. The best we can do at the moment is correlation.
jklinger410 4y ago
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/causing global warming. 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. Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  That last sentence is often used to criticize economics but haven’t heard it on harder “sciences” before.
  - richbell 4y ago
    It's fairly common, if you're familiar with how big agro-chemical firms influence research into the harms of their products (lookup Oki's Weird Stories video about Syngenta and Tyrone Hayes), how Purdue influences academia and the medical industry, etc. Empirical evidence and data can be used to selectively deceive. Companies can run hundreds of trials and only select ones that showed favorable results.
  - tekmate 4y ago
    because it makes absolutely no sense here. what op is criticizing is on businesspeople lying to make more profit, not scientists
  - dysoco 4y ago
    Not to diss on OP's comment, but out of context it sounds exactly like what COVID deniers usually say.
    - frereubu 4y ago
      That's exactly what I took from "(cough cough) disorders".
pfannkuchen 4y ago
I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary. My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall. 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. 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?
- make3 4y ago
  the products that both attacks the bacterias & are perfectly safe are probably very very hard to find, right. the product needs to be safe to flood your whole system with, because that's how pills work, you eat it and it diffuses everywhere in your system, there is zero targeting. Plus ideally it should kill all the bacterias very fast so none can develop resistance. it seems like it would be an incredibly hard balance.
- John23832 4y ago
  > I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary. It's scary because if you can't kill the bacteria, the bacteria kills you. -- > My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall. This layman's idea is incorrect. Not all antibiotics work on cell walls. Not all bacteria have defined cell walls. Look up Mycoplasma. -- > 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? Most of the antibiotics we have were either found by accident, or computed derivatives of something that was found by accident. We've exhausted the low hanging fruit. More complex antibiotics often have bad side effects (ciprofloxacin) or are effective enough that we use them in the most guarded fashion to keep them in the chamber when needed (carbapenem derivations). -- There's a metric crap ton of money going into the research of new antibiotics, it's just not straight forward.
jonplackett 4y ago
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
wasjosh 4y ago
How is something 3 or 4 on the front page here thats been known since the 40s?
- chucksmash 4y ago
  Article is about non-antibiotic medications contributing to antibiotic resistance. Has that been known?
  - yawnxyz 4y ago
    I work with a bunch of researchers and physicians on antibiotic resistance every day and I had no idea (though tbf I'm just the "computer guy" here)
adrianmonk 4y ago
> 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. [ ... ] > However, in bacteria grown in anaerobic conditions, levels of reactive oxygen species were much lower and antibiotic resistance developed much more slowly. [ ... ] > 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. So the study shows that antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics if you test in oxygen-rich conditions. But that doesn't match conditions in the human body, so this may not even be relevant to humans. Their next step is to study it in mice, which makes sense, but to me it seems like you can't conclude much right now.
- cosmojg 4y ago
  Given these findings, respiratory diseases still seem like a reasonable concern.
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Add to the list of nootropics that are possibly universal. It's like discovering that some plant derived psychiatric drugs are behavior modifiers for the plants too The suggestion that mental process begins at the cellular level.

311 points by charlieirish 4y ago

This seems a really week connection. > 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. So the study was: * Done in a petri dish * Done in an environment dissimilar to the human body * Showed an adaptation to the environment unrelated to antibiotic resistance Showing adaptation "efflux pumps" for oxygen removal and claiming it's applicable to antibiotics seems like claiming yoga mats are made from jet fuel because they both contain water. It would be really interesting if they tested a null here which I don't see noted anywhere. If the adaptation happened in the oxygen rich environment without the antibiotic it would indicate that antibiotics are not causal.

psychphysic 4y ago
It seems the mechanism is general enough that green tea, spices that are lauded for harming bacteria might be making them more virulent
cratermoon 4y ago
This article mentions that a study was done in humans and found no effect. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-01-24/study-suggests-use-of-antidepressants-generates-resistance-to-antibiotics.html https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-01-24/study-sug...

peteradio 4y ago

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

krautt 4y ago

Their dna sees our over=stressed modern lifestyles as an opportunity. shouldn't surprise us i guess.

tokai 4y ago

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.

stackbutterflow 4y ago
The answer is phages. But last time I went into the rabbit hole the TLDR was that it is not patentable so there's no money in it. And everyone needs a different phages cocktail. I sleep at night knowing that push come to shove someone will step in and mass produce machines to create personal phage cocktails.
- efields 4y ago
  Is the implication here that antibiotics are more commercially viable, but phages are the real solution? I'm unfamiliar with phages, but a quick lookup revealed "virus that eats bacteria" and it's like, yeah… let's do that to combat bacterial infections. I'm guessing alignment between phage/bacteria is crucial.
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago
    Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but what I got was that there's nothing to patent because phages are found in sewers and mud pools as is. Also every individual with a bacterial infection needs a custom cocktail so there's no one-size-fits-all pill that can be mass produced. Phages also have their own caveats but I don't remember what it is. The TLDR is that in the worst case scenario we still have phages and as far as I understand no bacteria can adapt to phages. But we need to figure out a way to make it commercially viable as you put it.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      As someone who knows nothing about biology, this as well as the limited shelf-life issue mentioned in other comments makes me wonder if something like “A collection of less specialized phages and a process by which they can be quickly programmed to go after a bacteria” could be patented. I’m sure this is dumb because if it wasn’t somebody would have done it by now, though.

psychphysic 4y ago

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

andy_ppp 4y ago

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.

theGnuMe 4y ago
Yeah the gut microbiome is the next big thing for sure. It should be easy to study. Food logs, mood logs, medication logs, next generation sequencing and maybe some metabolic profiling and we should be able to find interesting correlations. I know my mood changes drastically down when I fail to eat properly for a period of time.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  As if omics research isn't hard enough, there's a confounding layer of privacy and incentive problems here. From a science angle it makes more sense to just collect this data from everybody all the time and let the studies be post hoc explorations of that giant dataset. But how do you get people to cooperate when they have reason to believe that the data will be used against them? Either we accept the diminished value of isolated study-at-a-time datasets (as we're doing now), we figure out how to do this kind of research through a layer of homeomorphic encryption which the layman trusts (a tall order), or we wait for an era with more trustworthy institutions (potentially a long time). For this reason, I think it'll be like fusion power: the perpetual "next big thing".
  - Pilottwave 4y ago
    give out equity to the study participants. I'll hand over data of you give me some equity on future ideas built on that data. l Like artists getting payed royalties.
- John23832 4y ago
  > Yeah the gut microbiome is the next big thing for sure. It should be easy to study. It won't be. We aren't able to culture most gut bacteria. Most die immediately in oxygen. The best we can do at the moment is correlation.

jklinger410 4y ago

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/causing global warming. 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. Being anti conspiracy and overly trusting of certain (cough cough) fields of science denotes an inability to rationalize.

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
That last sentence is often used to criticize economics but haven’t heard it on harder “sciences” before.
- richbell 4y ago
  It's fairly common, if you're familiar with how big agro-chemical firms influence research into the harms of their products (lookup Oki's Weird Stories video about Syngenta and Tyrone Hayes), how Purdue influences academia and the medical industry, etc. Empirical evidence and data can be used to selectively deceive. Companies can run hundreds of trials and only select ones that showed favorable results.
- tekmate 4y ago
  because it makes absolutely no sense here. what op is criticizing is on businesspeople lying to make more profit, not scientists
- dysoco 4y ago
  Not to diss on OP's comment, but out of context it sounds exactly like what COVID deniers usually say.
  - frereubu 4y ago
    That's exactly what I took from "(cough cough) disorders".

pfannkuchen 4y ago

I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary. My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall. 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. 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?

make3 4y ago
the products that both attacks the bacterias & are perfectly safe are probably very very hard to find, right. the product needs to be safe to flood your whole system with, because that's how pills work, you eat it and it diffuses everywhere in your system, there is zero targeting. Plus ideally it should kill all the bacterias very fast so none can develop resistance. it seems like it would be an incredibly hard balance.
John23832 4y ago
> I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary. It's scary because if you can't kill the bacteria, the bacteria kills you. -- > My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall. This layman's idea is incorrect. Not all antibiotics work on cell walls. Not all bacteria have defined cell walls. Look up Mycoplasma. -- > 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? Most of the antibiotics we have were either found by accident, or computed derivatives of something that was found by accident. We've exhausted the low hanging fruit. More complex antibiotics often have bad side effects (ciprofloxacin) or are effective enough that we use them in the most guarded fashion to keep them in the chamber when needed (carbapenem derivations). -- There's a metric crap ton of money going into the research of new antibiotics, it's just not straight forward.

jonplackett 4y ago

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

wasjosh 4y ago

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

chucksmash 4y ago
Article is about non-antibiotic medications contributing to antibiotic resistance. Has that been known?
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  I work with a bunch of researchers and physicians on antibiotic resistance every day and I had no idea (though tbf I'm just the "computer guy" here)

adrianmonk 4y ago

> 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. [ ... ] > However, in bacteria grown in anaerobic conditions, levels of reactive oxygen species were much lower and antibiotic resistance developed much more slowly. [ ... ] > 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. So the study shows that antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics if you test in oxygen-rich conditions. But that doesn't match conditions in the human body, so this may not even be relevant to humans. Their next step is to study it in mice, which makes sense, but to me it seems like you can't conclude much right now.

cosmojg 4y ago
Given these findings, respiratory diseases still seem like a reasonable concern.

pmayrgundter 4y ago

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