Antibiotic exposure of babies in the mother’s womb, as well as during their first 90 days of life, increases the risk of childhood seborrheic dermatitis.
This was found in an analysis of data from the United Kingdom, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology and published by Medscape. According to the study, the risk is present regardless of whether or not the mother has a history of this type of dermatitis.
“Seborrheic dermatitis is a common skin disease, which shares similarities with atopic dermatitis or atopic eczema, since both are inflammatory skin diseases that are permanent and can present with a chronic, relapsing and remitting course,” explained the author of the study Zelma C. Chiesa Fuxench, who is a master of science in clinical epidemiology and assistant professor of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
For this study, a population of 1,023,140 children with linked maternal data was included, followed on average for 10.2 years. At the beginning of the study, the average age of the mothers was 28 years; of these, 3% had seborrheic dermatitis and 14% had atopic dermatitis.
Another data determined in unadjusted analyzes is that mothers with seborrheic dermatitis were more likely to receive antibiotics during pregnancy than those who did not have it.
“The trimester of intrauterine penicillin exposure did not appear to affect the association with seborrheic dermatitis,” the researchers concluded. They also determined that the risk increased with exposure to cephalosporins.
According to Dr. Chiesa“exposure in utero to antibiotics, mainly penicillin, may have its greatest effect on the colonization of the skin microbiota in the neonatal period, which leads to the development of infantile seborrheic dermatitis.”
The expert, together with her group of researchers, found in a previous analysis that exposure to antibiotics in babies in the womb and also 90 days after birth increases the risk of atopic dermatitis in children, and increases if there is exposure to penicillin.
Journalist with a degree in Media Production from the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica. Commercial announcer trained at the National Learning Institute.
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Marianela Sanabria Leandro
Journalist with a degree in Media Production from the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica. Commercial announcer trained at the National Learning Institute.
