Individual-specific recovery of the healthy human gut microbiota after antibiotics

After broad-spectrum antibiotics, the gut microbiome endpoint is significantly closer to each individual’s own baseline than to alternative healthy baselines in over 90% of people under the mildest regimen and in two thirds under stronger anaerobe-targeting regimens.

• Why it matters: It remains unclear whether antibiotic recovery returns people to their own pre-treatment microbiome or shifts them into other healthy states, which matters because unique microbiome composition can influence immune regulation and metabolic processing.
• What they did: The study compared each subject’s post-antibiotic endpoint to their baseline and to every other subject’s baseline across four cohorts (n = 121) receiving regimens from five-day fluoroquinolone to a four-day three-drug combination.
• The result: Individual-specific recovery persists even when baseline taxa are undetected for weeks to months, with newly established taxa functionally resembling the pre-treatment community; state switching was uncommon and mainly linked to the largest reductions in detected taxa.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.