Probiotics Help Reduce Antibiotic Resistance in Premature Babies – New Study Finds

In addition to helping premature babies develop a healthy flora of microscopic life in the gut, they reduce the risk of harmful bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, writes UiT, Norway’s Arctic University, in a press release.

Every year around 15 million premature babies are born worldwide. In babies born up to several months before their due date, the immune system is less mature than in children born after nine months. They thus have a completely different microbial community in the colon and have a greater risk of getting infections and inflammation than those born at term.

Giving antibiotics to premature infants makes the children more vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant variants of the harmful bacteria, but now researchers at UiT have found that probiotics help these children achieve a better bacterial balance in the gut and eradicate harmful bacteria, while the underdeveloped microbiome in their gut matures.

– With probiotics, extremely premature infants had a reduced risk of being carriers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, despite frequent treatment with antibiotics, UiT writes in a report.

– We discovered that premature newborns who had received probiotics had bacteria with significantly fewer resistance genes than the infants who did not receive probiotic supplements, says PhD student Ahmed Bargheet, who is the first author of the study.