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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.
Yes, but we've yet to develop nano-sized shotguns, so that'll have to wait.
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.
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High blood sugar does not necessarily mean you ate a lot of sugar, in fact, the summary sounds like they are talking about white sugar. White sugar is far from the only sugar out there. The basic rule of thumb is: if the ingredient ends with "ose", it's a sugar (sucrose, dextrose, lactose, fructose, etc). Btw, I come from a family with a long history of Diabetes (both type 1 and 2).
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.
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Apparently, it also helps the poison go down...
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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 was actually reading about this this morning. Sugars have 6 carbon atoms, while Xylitol has 5. Bacteria and yeasts only consume sugars that have 6 carbon atoms, so effectively Xylitol would not have the same effect.
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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?
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.