Drug-Resistant Acne: All in the Family

来源：www.webmd.com 作者：DanielDeNoon 打印本文放入收藏夹收藏到新浪

摘要： Oct。 2, 2006 -- An antibiotic-resistant acne germ can spread among family members, Swedish researchers find。The germ is Propionibacterium acnes。 Skin colonized by P。 acnes tends to erupt into the blotches and pustules of acne。 Since the 1960s, doctors have fought P。 acnes with antibiotic......

Oct. 2, 2006 -- An antibiotic-resistant acne germ can spread among family members, Swedish researchers find.

The germ is Propionibacterium acnes. Skin colonized by P. acnes tends to erupt into the blotches and pustules of acne. Since the 1960s, doctors have fought P. acnes with antibiotics. The bug fought back. It's now common to find P. acnes strains resistant to several common antibiotics.

Doctors hoped that the only people carrying the drug-resistant acne bugs would be patients on long-term antibiotic therapy. That isn't the case, find Carl Eric Nord, MD, PhD, and colleagues at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nord and colleagues took skin samples from 10 acne patients, all on antibiotic therapy, and from two close family contacts of each patient. Twelve healthy, acne-free volunteers -- who were not taking antibiotics and did not have family members with acne -- served as a comparison group.

Nord and colleagues found that nearly half of the family members carried drug-resistant acne bacteria on their skin. Genetic analysis showed that these family members carried the same strain of P. acnes as the acne patient among them.

The good news is that the family members fought off the drug-resistant germs -- but only after the acne patient in their family stopped using antibiotics.

On the other hand, you apparently can't avoid drug-resistant acne germs by avoiding people with acne. A third of the healthy comparison group also carried drug-resistant P. acnes on their skin.

Nord reported the findings at last week's 46th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, held Sept. 27-30 in San Francisco.

SOURCES: 46th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, San Francisco, Sept. 27-30, 2006.

发布日期：2006-10-3

分页：