This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Long-term use of tetracycline reduced prevalence of S. aureus

Fanelli M. Arch Dermatol. 2011;doi:10.1001/archdermatol.2011.67.

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

The prolonged use of tetracycline antibiotics for long-term treatment of clinically diagnosed acne reduced colonization of Staphylococcus aureus without increasing resistance to the drug class.

David J. Margolis, MD, PhD, of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and colleagues conducted a cross-sectional study of 83 university dermatology clinic patients with acne to determine the prevalence of S. aureus and its resistance phenotypes. The researchers also investigated susceptibility patterns between patients with acne using antibiotics and those who were not. The median age of the participants was 24 years; 32 were male.

All study participants were examined for presence and severity of acne before oropharyngeal and nasal swab cultures were performed. On samples found positive for the bacteria, susceptibility testing was done using disk diffusion testing with clindamycin, erythromycin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, ciprofloxacin, tetracycline, doxycycline and minocycline.

In all, 43% of patients were colonized with S. aureus; two of the 36 (6%) had the methicillin-resistant strain; 20 (56%) has S. aureus in their throat; nine (25%) had S. aureus only in their nose; seven (19%) had S. aureus in their nose and throat. When antibiotic-using acne patients were compared with nonusers, the prevalence OR for the colonization of S. aureus was 0.16 (95% CI, 0.08-1.37) after 1 to 2 months of exposure, increasing to 0.52 (95% CI, 0.12-2.17) after 2 months of exposure (P=.31). There was a less than 10% resistance rate to tetracycline antibiotics among the S. aureus isolates. Clindamycin experienced a 40% resistance rate; erythromycin had a 44% rate.

“With respect to the use of tetracycline antibiotics, it contradicts previous ideologies that long-term prescribing of antibiotics causes increased prevalence of and resistance to S. aureus,” the investigators wrote. “Specifically, in our study, the prolonged use of antibiotics from the tetracycline class that are commonly used to treat acne lowered the prevalence of colonization by S. aureus and did not increase resistance to the tetracycline antibiotics.”

Disclosure: The study was supported in part by a grant from the NIH.

Follow InfectiousDiseaseNews.com on Twitter.