Slashdot Mirror
Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Persistent Bacteria Go Down
Doctors have discovered that adding sugar to antibiotics increases their ability to knock out persistent staph infections (abstract). Certain types of bacteria called persisters shut down their metabolic processes when exposed to antibiotics. Adding sugar keeps the bacteria feeding, making them more susceptible to drugs. From the article: "Adding such a simple and widely available compound to existing antibiotics enhances their effectiveness against persisters, and fast. One test showed that a sugared up antibiotic could eliminate 99.9 percent of persisters in two hours, while a regular antibiotic did nothing. Doctors believe that this discovery will help treat urinary tract infections, staph infections, and strep throat, but its most life-saving application may be against the age-old disease tuberculosis. This infection of the lungs kills many people, and is hard to fight off. A little sugar could help save a lot of lives."
I'm taking this with a grain of salt.
Don't hunters already use this method, somehow? Bait an animal with food to lure it out in the open and then kill it?
Maybe some sugar in my coffee will help get rid of the bone infection in my jaw after the dentist screwed up my root canal. They got me on 2 types of antibiotics the infections hurts my face up to my eye. Funny thing is I try and avoid sugar even though I really like sweet coffee. Doubt it is that simple though.
Discovered? No, we've known this and used this for years. It's a typical procedure to treat difficult wounds that are failing to close by 2nd or 3rd intention with sugar or honey. We also grind up fenitoin pills (used to treat epileptics) and add them to the wound, since fenitoin stimulates fibroblasts and helps with would healing. Of course this is not an FDA approved use of the drug, but it works.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...the reason why we currently think honey works is not because of sugar, but because of enzymes in it which produce hydrogen peroxide.
Xylitol is another form of sugar that in addition to low calories and insulin response, kills bacteria and the evil Helicobacter pylori that causes cavities and ulcers. Stay tuned for the 2027 study that will prove it effective!
...omphaloskepsis often...
How exactly can this technique be used to fight tuberculosis, which lives in the lungs? The sugar in the antibiotic would be absorbed into the blood stream before the antibiotic could get to the infection. Unless they're talking about inhaling the antibiotic with the sugar.. which I suppose is a possibility.
Maybe it's some kind of bonding process that bonds the sugar to the antibiotic? I suppose I could read the article if I was that curious.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I always thought n/t meant "no text", indicating the post itself was empty (which isn't possible with /.)
Could you please enlighten me?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Most antibiotics are to be taken just after a meal , when your blood sugar levels are peaking.
However , maybe a little more sugar wouldn't be a bad idea.
I can see it now. Drug companies will take their existing antibiotics, add a bit of sugar, and then upcharge $5 per fill for Sugarfukitol over normal Fukitol.
If these bacteria feed on sugar, then wouldn't significantly cutting down on sugar when treating them make good sense?
I know I've never had a doctor make such a recommendation before though.
I wouldn't mind that, then maybe they wouldn't put sugar in every freaking thing. In many places one can't even find yoghourt without added sugar.
Dilbert RSS feed
Considering that the standard placebo is a sugar pill, it's certainly something that should be investigated.
Apparently, it also helps the poison go down...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And in Soviet Russia, the TITLE is made in the joke!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
No I won't!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
What does this mean for previous studies that use a sugar pill for placebo?
If the placebo itself was causing a positive reaction instead of being neutral, how much material needs to be reviewed again?
I doubt very much that there will be a 200% price increase.
Big pharma will, however, gladly take a brand new patent out on each antibiotic+sugar as the old patent is running out.
Much more lucrative, that.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Can people please read the article before making inane comments, we are talking about aminoglycosides here not glucose, fructose or sucrose. This is a amino-modified sugar that are not absorbed in the gut. They have been around for a long time but until now they had not been used in conjunction with specific metabolites. So this has nothing to do with diabetics or blood sugar.
I'm expecting a "new formula" for damn near every drug that could benefit from this...of course big pharma is going to claim they added "medical-grade" sugar, to justify the 200% price increase.
Its not normal sugars, its amino-modified sugars. They are not absorbed in the gut these are a different molecule altogether.
I've heard of putting sugar on a cut with some antibiotic ointment, supposedly to promote faster healing. I hadn't heard that it was supposed to improve the effectiveness of the antibiotic, though. I thought it was to promote cell growth.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This was an interesting article. I especially like the the fact that sugar can aid in the improvement of the antibacterial meds and rid the pesky little bacteria
make fast money online
Well, they can't patent sugar itself - only this use at most (would Mary Poppins count as prior art?). However, it will need to be manufactured to GMP standards and the particular brand of sugar being administered would need to be shown to be bioequivalent to the sugar used in the trials. So, expect to pay a few bucks for your one-spoon measured dose.
Of course, that is only required if the company making the sugar wants to sell it with advertising that indicates that it is medically useful. I doubt anybody will go to this level of trouble. However, with litigation being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody comes out with such a brand and doctors all flock to it (nobody ever got sued for prescribing Niaspan(TM)).
What might be more likely is that somebody comes up with some kind of novel sugar analog that CAN be patented, and that would be expensive, but would likely have stronger clinical support (since with financial backing you can do more trials/etc).
We really need more publicly-funded clinical trials. Right now most trials have huge conflicts of interest, and they are only run on expensive products, since those are the only ones where somebody has the financial interest to pay the cost of an expensive trial.
So apparently a placebo (sugar pill) actually CAN have real effect!
Patent sugar, sue the sugar manufacturers for infringement, destroy the sugar industry. When sugar is only available in our pills, charge $200 for a box of them. Shut down production after 5 years, and lock up the patents for the next 200 years. Implement worldwide. Profit! Sugar is gone.
Eric Holder is that you?
It is hardly surprising this method works. It is one man has used for several millennium or more when making beer. Once yeast is pitched it will consume all or a good portion of the existing sugars. Once the alcohol content reaches a certain level or there is no more sugars left, they will go dormant. You can reactivate them by adding more sugar; there is of course a limit to the amount of additional sugar that can be added and the yeasts alcohol tolerances; some yeast strains are more tolerant of high alcohol levels than others.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Yes because antibiotics do wonders on colds.
Or maybe it's a competely unrelated thing to making lemon (with it's high vitamin C content) palatable?
Please refuse antibiotics from the evil Big Pharma next time you have an infection.
Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down!
In this case that old adage happens to apply to both the host and the invader.
Gee...I don't know WHAT to believe any more!!!
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/18/2317205/Is-Sugar-Toxic
Agile Spaceport - You will never find a more wretched hive of scrum and villainy. We must be cautious.
The glucose is the metabolite and is used alongside an aminoglycoside antibiotic. It is aminoglycoside dependent because adding the sugar only works with aminoglycoside antibiotics: mannitol (the sugar) was tested with gentamicin (an aminoglycoside antibiotic), ofloxacin (a quinolone antibiotic) and ampicillin (a beta-lactam, specifically a penicillin antibiotic) and the only one which showed an improved response was the mannitol + gentamicin combination.
Glucose, mannitol and fructose then showed the greatest response with gentamicin (ribose, glycerol etc were much lower).
Have you read the article?
So - lemme get this... Mary Poppins was right? A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down?
Studies have pointed to the fact that many bacteria still "eat" the Xylitol -- they just can't digest it, and starve, or are otherwise impaired. Not a bad thing in these cases.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21037297 for one of many cromulent studies out there involving bacterial uptake of Xylitol.
Bacteria both having been intelligently designed and causing disease doesn't necessarily imply a malevolent Creator. It only means that they've microevolved from the bacteria that the Creator put in mammals' intestines.
I actually live in the EU, so our added sugar is still mainly sucrose, as far as I know.
Dilbert RSS feed
People eat unsweetened yogurt? Yuck.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
io9 to nature
lightweights
Like anyone can even know that
Thank you for getting my point. For this crowd I should have been more specific. When you get the bill for this treatment the sugar will be billed to you at the equivalent $1000/lbm kind of like the $10 aspirin.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
When preserving food by heating it, it makes a difference whether the bacteria are active or dormant. You kill them much more effectively, if you catch them feeding. If you do other preserving steps (like unfavorable pH or osmotic conditions) too early, bacteria go dormant and survive the heat much better.
"but its most life-saving application may be against the age-old disease tuberculosis." What a tragedy. Tuberculosis was practically unheard of in the U.S. by the 1970s and 80s, but experienced a resurgence due to failure to care for cases occurring among AIDS patients, the homeless, the poor, and illegal immigrants. Tuberculosis was once treatable--not at great expense, but not with one cheap vaccine shot, either; careful treatment and followup was needed to make sure that the infection was completely cured. This wasn't done, and the result is that now we have resistant strains.
Infectious disease does not know how to respect social status, and the upper- and middle classes cannot be healthy if the poor are sick. As the debate over health care continues, it is something to keep in mind.
I hope this new advance works. Otherwise, boomers may be the only generation in the history of the human race to live our entire lives free of the terror of bacterial infection.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, I get the joke, but the usual disclaimer for these kind of results applies: did this work in vivo or just in the test tube? The abstract shows one experiment done in vivo: they introduced infected catheters into mice, then treated the mice with 1) nothing, 2) antibiotic, and 3) antibiotic plus mannitol (a sugar alcohol). Option 3) killed substantial amounts of bad bacteria, while the others did not. So that's good. But... they used kind of a lot of mannitol - 1.5 g/kg - which would be the equivalent of a couple of ounces (twice daily) for a typical human. That might be tough to swallow (so to speak).
More buts: all of these results seemed to apply to biofilms, and although controlling the growth of biofilms is important, infecting bacteria are most likely not in the form of biofilms after they've invaded the body. And it's unclear to me whether any of the other experiments were done in vivo. Also, if the presence of sugar at the infection site is key to getting this to work, that might be problematic - mammal bodies keep blood sugar concentration on fairly tight control, no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar you eat, so it might be tough to produce the sugar concentration you need at the infection site.
Bottom line: sounds like interesting, promising research. But bear in mind that it's not ready for prime time now, and might not ever be.
Actually, several sorts of bacteria (notably including those responsible for tooth decay), are attracted to xylitol, will attempt to eat it, and and then starve.
Even if this turns out to work in real life, the amount of sugar used to accompany antibiotics would be dwarfed by, say, world-wide production of Coca-Cola alone. And of course that's only one current use of sugar. This use wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket by comparison.