Antibiotics Ruin New Testing for Crohn's Disease: Study

Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, is often initially mistaken as a bacterial infection, prompting immediate antibiotic treatment from physicians. Administering antibiotics to a body unaffected by bad bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing, but has been known to disrupt the balance of bacteria that naturally live within the human body. According to a new study, initial misdiagnoses and antibiotic treatment may actually make things worse for patients suffering from Crohn's disease, as it has been discovered that assessment of microbial balances in a patient's body can actually help identify the disease.

In a study published in Cell Host and Microbe, researchers measured the microbial levels in the rectum and fecal matter of 668 participants. These patients consisted of 447 children who had just recently been diagnosed with Crohn's and 221 children who did not have Crohn's disease but were showing symptoms of the illness, such as bloating and diarrhea.

Fecal and rectal swab samples were taken from all 668 children and compared, taking into account age factors such as duration of symptoms and medical history.

Researchers quickly found that in the children with actual Crohn's disease displayed evidence of an abundance of harmful microbial species. Adversely, there also appeared to be an under-abundance of bacteria normally considered beneficial to the human body, particularly for the intestines and rectum.

The control group consisting of patients without the disease showed more nominal numbers of microbial.

According to the study's author, this information could help researchers and physicians more easily diagnose the disease from something even as simple as a rectal swab, as opposed to the current most common way to acquire a sure diagnoses -- a colonoscopy.

However, the researchers do note that a tendency to subscribe antibiotics at the first sign of a potential bacterial infection could ruin the chances of an effective diagnosis through these new means. Crohn's disease causes an inflammation of the bowels due to an abnormal immune system response to food matter in the intestines. The symptoms of this, including swelling of the bowels, stomach pain, and diarrhea, often are the same symptoms of common bacterial infections, prompting doctors to subscribe antibiotics to treat it. These antibiotics, the researchers write, will attack and eliminate microbes in the intestines without distinctions, skewing the abundance of various microbial species and ruining the chances of a swab-sample diagnosis.

Much like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers urge physicians to hold off prescribing antibiotics until the patient's condition worsens or at least after other tests, such as the aforementioned microbial count test, have been conducted.

The study was published in Cell Host and Microbe on March 12.