Health Headline: Antibiotics and Kidney Stones

For this week’s Memos, I picked three health headlines from the past week and examined the studies behind them to see if they were headline worthy. Let’s begin with the use of antibiotics and the risk of kidney stones.

Researchers in the United Kingdom examined the incidence of kidney stones in over 13 million children and adults between 1994 and 2015. They examined the medical records of over 25,000 subjects with stones and compared them with over 250,000 matched-control subjects. The researchers wanted to compare the use of antibiotics with the onset of kidney stones.

The researchers found that there was a relationship between the use of five different classes of antibiotics and the onset of kidney stones. The relationship appeared to be stronger with younger subjects and the risk lasted longer: up to five years.

Headline worthy? In the abstract, the researchers wrote about the relationship between changes in the microbiome and kidney stones. Antibiotics can cause changes to the microbiome, but they did not test the microbiome of any subjects. Therefore, there’s a statistical relationship but nothing more. On top of that, the risk of getting a kidney stone over 21 years was just 0.19%.

Conclusion: not headline worthy. It’s worth researching further to establish whether there’s a cause and effect relationship along with the role of the microbiome in the process.

What are you prepared to do today?