How Antibiotic Use Harms Breast Cancer Patients

Over the past few years, we’ve learned how an unbalanced gut creates far more health challenges, especially when breast cancer is involved.

In some cases, scientists have shown how gut health imbalances can reprogram healthy mast cells (immune cells in healthy breast tissue) that allow cancer to spread to other parts of the human body.

Unfortunately, the most effective disruptor of the human gut — antibiotics — exerts its own problematic effect on your body’s immune system to fight breast cancer and it may be linked to an increased risk of death, according to a recent study appearing in Nature Communications.

Lower Survival Rates

Scientists at Stanford University monitored the health of 772 women over at least a five-year period from 2000-14 with triple-negative breast cancer (a form of the disease that’s rare, but more aggressive and harder to treat).

Patients treated with antimicrobials (a class of drugs that includes antibiotics to fight infections) were more likely to have decreased amounts of lymphocytes (immune cells in their bloodstreams).

Stanford researchers believe those lower numbers of lymphocytes and the use of antimicrobials are tied to health-harming disruptions in the balance of gut bacteria that could shorten a breast cancer patient’s life.

Interestingly, mortality rates differ between woman never took antimicrobials (20 percent) and those who did (23 percent). What really increased the risk of death was the total number of drugs prescribed to each patient and the amount of exposure from a wider variety of drugs (tetracycline or amoxycillin).

This risk of death due to exposure to antimicrobials lasted about three years after a diagnosis and gradually decreased over the final two years.

The Probiotics Effect

Some very important data that’s missing from this Stanford study: Comparing individual gut microbiomes through fecal samples, something that will be addressed in a future study that addresses gut health, antibiotic use and long-term cancer survival.

We hope researchers will also examine the proven and very beneficial effect that multi-strain probiotics, like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic with 30 BILLION bacterial allies, have on protecting a patient’s gut health while taking an antibiotic.

References

Nature Communications

Stanford Medicine News Center

Tech Explorist

Medical NewsToday