Becker’s Hospital Review recently reported on a study which showed that giving patients multiple antibiotics may be strengthening resistance. This study found that “developing tolerance to one of the antibiotics in a combination may increase the likelihood of developing resistance to the second drug.”
Researchers studied the impact of an antibiotic combination regimen in patients who were infected for over two weeks with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus despite antibiotic treatment. They found that microbes in the bacteria taken from patients that had developed resistance against one antibiotic, had also developed tolerance against the second antibiotic in the combination. They concluded that the combination of antibiotics was not more effective than using a single antibiotic.
This study “indicates that clinicians may need to laboratory test bacteria infecting their patients to determine whether it is tolerant to an antibiotic that is part of a patient’s planned treatment.”
