Taking medicine and adding sugar may enhance the bactericidal effect of the medicine

Xinhua News Agency, London, May 11 (Reporter Huang Wei) Adding some sugar when taking medicine is a common experience. Generally speaking, they are all aimed at better helping drugs to swallow, and a new article published in the magazine “Nature” The study said that adding sugar may also help enhance the antiseptic effect of antibiotics.

One of the problems that often occurs when using bactericidal drugs is that a small proportion of bacteria can be transferred into a similarly dormant state in the body. In this state, the bacteria are not active and therefore the drugs have no effect on them. They will attack the waves of drugs. I escaped. But after a few weeks or months, these bacteria will become active again, leading to long-term disease that is difficult to eradicate.

However, these dormant bacteria do not mutate and become resistant, so normal drugs are still effective as long as they wake up from dormancy. Researchers at institutions such as Boston University reported that they found a simple and convenient way to add some sugar while taking medicine. Sugar can stimulate the bacteria in dormancy and make them return to active state sooner, which is beneficial to the drug.

Professor James Collins, who led the study, said that the British "clouds of sugar can help the drugs swallow," and may now be changed to "a spoonful of sugar can help the drug work."

Experiments have shown that adding sugar to a drug at the same time can eliminate 99.9% of dormant bacteria within two hours, but this effect is not achieved without sugar. In addition, the use of drugs against Staphylococcus aureus has this effect. Researchers are exploring whether this method will also work for other bacteria that cause diseases such as tuberculosis.

However, currently researchers only perform experiments on animals, and further studies are needed to confirm whether this method is effective for humans. If the same method is applied to humans, it means that there is no need to combine multiple antibiotics or develop new drugs to achieve better bactericidal effect, which can help reduce infections and save medical costs.