Antibiotic resistance is one of the most serious threats to global health today, linked to the excessive and too often incorrect use of antibiotics. But can other classes of drugs contribute to this phenomenon? This is the question asked by a team of Chinese and Australian researchers from the University of Queensland (Australia). This idea arose in 2014, when one of these researchers, Jianhua Guo, highlighted more genes linked to antibiotic resistance in domestic wastewater than in hospital wastewatera place where the consumption of antibiotics is higher than in the general population.
Antidepressants are the 5e the most prescribed pharmacological class in the world, with a market share equivalent to that of antibiotics, around 5% (in the United States alone, 16,000 kg of these products are consumed each year).
The University of Queensland team had already shown in 2018 that fluoxetine (Prozac) induced the appearance of resistance to several antibiotics in the bacterium Escherichia coli. To determine how generalizable these initial results were, the scientists repeated the experiment with the same strain ofE. colibut this time using five antidepressants – sertraline, escitalopram, bupropion, duloxetine and agomelatine – at different concentrations, from 0.1 to 100 mg/L.
