You overcome an infection, finish your course of antibiotics, and breathe a sigh of relief. However, months pass and something doesn't add up: your digestion remains heavy, gas doesn't go away, and suddenly you notice food intolerances you didn't have before. This is the invisible trail left by drugs in your intestinal ecosystem.
As we explain in our article on what an intestinal dysbiosis test is and what it is used for, antibiotics alter the overall balance of your microbiota. But today, from Vivabioma, we want to delve deeper into a much more deeply rooted and silent danger: the emergence of the bacterial resistome.
What is the resistome?
To understand why your symptoms do not improve, we must look at how bacteria behave at a microscopic level in the face of a chemical threat:
- Survival of the fittest: The repeated use of antimicrobial drugs acts as an extreme filter. It wipes out sensitive bacteria (both the beneficial ones and those causing the original infection), but leaves certain mutated strains alive that are capable of resisting the attack. The set of genes that grant this "armor" to the surviving bacteria is what we know as the resistome.
- The persistence of damage: While a common dysbiosis is based on a temporary loss of diversity, the resistome entails a structural alteration. Resistant pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumoniae entrench themselves in your gut and, if they proliferate, can make inflammation and digestive discomfort chronic. Furthermore, by keeping these resistance genes active, they can limit the effectiveness of future medical treatments using the same antibiotics.
What is the benefit of knowing my resistome?
Although your resistome load does not significantly alter your daily digestion if there is no proliferation of pathogenic bacteria, it constitutes a critical indicator of your medical and collective safety: if you suffer an infection, other bacteria can acquire these gut genes and render standard antibiotics useless, which increases the risk of severe and untreatable complications following surgeries or immunosuppressive therapies, and additionally turns you into an asymptomatic carrier capable of silently transmitting these superbugs to vulnerable people around you.
With the microbiota test you will be able to know exactly which resistance genes and pathogens predominate in your gut through the most advanced analysis, giving you and your doctor another prevention tool at your disposal.