Repeated use of some types of antibiotic may raise the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, warn researchers.
New research has studied over 200,000 people from the UK who were diagnosed with diabetes between 1995 and 2013.
Researchers counted the number of antibiotic prescriptions they had during an average five-year period before they were diagnosed.
More than 3 million Britons are diagnosed with diabetes and nine out of ten have type 2 which occurs when the body gradually loses the ability to process blood sugar.
They found that people taking antibiotics were more likely to develop diabetes, and those taking more were at a higher risk.
For example, people who took five or more antibiotic courses in the five-year period before diagnosis had around a third higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those taking no antibiotics.
We should not assume that the results mean antibiotics definitely cause diabetes. It could be the other way round.
Diabetes is known to increase the risk of infection, especially skin and urinary infections, so it could be diabetes leading to antibiotic use, and not vice versa.
Researchers attempted to adjust for this by only looking at antibiotic use for more than one year before a diagnosis of diabetes was made. However, this may not have been long enough.
However researchers did not take into account other factors that could have caused the results, such as the use of other medications known to increase the risk of diabetes and infections, such as steroids.
