In a new study, researchers at Cedars-Sinai found that antibiotics have sex-specific effects on the gut microbiome makeup of male and female laboratory rats. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, could have implications for using the drugs in humans to treat or prevent bacterial infection.
“We found that giving the rats a multidrug antibiotic cocktail resulted in significant and sex-specific changes in both the stool, or large intestine, and the small bowel. For example, greater loss of the diversity of the microbes in both stool and small bowel was observed in the male rodents than in the females,” said Ruchi Mathur, MD, the study’s principal investigator.
