Antibiotic Use Only Weakly Linked to Bacterial Resistance: Study Finds - Video

According to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS, antibiotic resistance generally stabilizes over time. This issue poses a significant public health threat, playing a role in an estimated 5 million deaths annually. Gaining insight into long-term resistance trends can aid public health researchers in tracking and understanding drug resistance, as well as assessing the effectiveness of efforts to combat it.

In this study, researchers analyzed drug resistance in more than 3 million bacterial samples collected across 30 countries in Europe from 1998 to 2019. Samples encompassed eight bacteria species important to public health, including Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. They found that while antibiotic resistance initially rises in response to antibiotic use, it does not rise indefinitely. Instead, resistance rates reached an equilibrium over the 20-year period in most species.

Antibiotic use contributed to how quickly resistance levels stabilized as well as variability in resistance rates across different countries. But the association between changes in drug resistance and antibiotic use was weak, suggesting that additional, yet unknown, factors are at play.

Senior author Sonja Lehtinen summarizes: "In this study, we were interested in whether antibiotic resistance frequencies in Europe were systematically increasing over the long-term. Instead, we find a pattern where, after an initial increase, resistance frequencies tend to reach a stable plateau."

Reference: Emons M, Blanquart F, Lehtinen S (2025) The evolution of antibiotic resistance in Europe, 1998–2019. PLoS Pathog 21(4): e1012945. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1012945