Infants' antibiotic use tied to bowel disease risk

[Ineedsomesleep]

Interesting, especially as the antibiotics were prescribed for middle ear infections, the risk of which is increased if the baby is ff:

www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69S39E20101029

Sorry, I'll try posting that link again shall I?

here

36 children with IBD: it's a tiny study.

A tiny study and even the person who ran it admitted that "the design of the study does not, however, allow any conclusions about cause-and-effect"

So often the way, but it never stops people drawing conclusions

Interesting article, Ineedsomesleep.

You couldn't draw cause and effect conclusions unless you did a proper experiment though surely? And that would be unethical.

Do GPs have the detailed statistics of how many children used these antibotics and how many also have bowel disease? Isn't it possible to draw conclusions from these statistics?

Not cause and effect conclusions I wouldn't have thought. Not from what is a correlational study.

Epidemiology is fiendish.
You can say that X number of children have had these antibiotics and X number of children have developed IBD, but to make any statements about cause and effect, you need to have controlled for ALL SORTS OF other factors (as in, hundreds) and there just aren't the data for those.

Clear-cut cause and effect like 'exposure to cigarette smoke is linked to lung cancer' is really unusual.

If it were that easy to do it with GP data, they'd have more than 36 children in the study, for a start.