Children who are put on medication early in life are not necessarily going to develop asthma.
For years, a common school of thought over asthma is that it can be caused in children who are put on antibiotics early in life. A study that was published in the medical journal Chest back in 2007 asserted that toddlers who are put on any kind of antibacterial medication are vulnerable to developing asthma by the age of seven. The reason for this, the report concluded, was that the medicine would actually kill good bacteria that help the development of a person’s immune system, as well as the ones that were causing a disease.
Well, this theory might be discredited once and for all, as a new study that was published in The Lancet wrote that the antibiotics are not the root cause of asthma, although they can leave a child at an increased risk for its development. Instead, the true problem lies within the genetic variants on a very specific region of a person’s 17th chromosome. The researchers studied 1,000 children from their birth to age 11 in order to track their development. What they found was that there were two genes on chromosome 17 that were associated with antibiotic use within the first year of life.
While they found that children who were put on antibiotics early in life did have impaired antiviral immunity later on, there was no clear connection between being on these prescribed drugs and having asthma or allergies. Children on antibiotics do tend to have a breathing affliction in their lifetime, but there is an underlying genetic cause that is the real culprit, not the medication.
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