(Duty editor: Luo Liping, intern editor: Ye Jiesi) Most popular health articles: Meridian photography of lifeblood, flip-flops increase foot burden, good sleeping posture can remove wrinkles, clever matching of bedroom animals, excessive pressure signals, ten water drinking habits expose that you are a water-blind person, 10 health tips for the sedentary people, seven common misconceptions about using mobile phones for calls, three wrong toothbrushing methods waste teeth, overly rich facial expressions easily lead to aging, it only takes five steps from fatigue to disease. Taking medicine with sugar is a common experience for people. Generally speaking, it is for better help in swallowing the medicine. However, according to the latest research published in the British journal "Nature", adding sugar may also help enhance the bactericidal effect of antibiotics.
A common problem now when using bactericidal drugs is that a small part of bacteria will enter a state similar to hibernation in the body. In this state, bacteria are not active, so the drugs have no effect on them, allowing them to escape unscathed during the drug attack. But after a few weeks or months, these bacteria return to an active state, leading to prolonged diseases that are difficult to eliminate.
However, these dormant bacteria have not mutated and developed resistance. Therefore, as long as they can be awakened from hibernation, regular drugs are still effective. Researchers from Boston University and other institutions reported that they have found a simple and convenient method - taking some sugar at the same time as medication. Sugar can stimulate dormant bacteria, making them return to an active state earlier, which is beneficial for the complete elimination of bacteria by the drug.
Professor James Collins, who led the study, said that there is an English proverb: "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." Now it might be changed to "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine work."
Experiments showed that if sugar is added while using drugs against E. coli, 99.9% of dormant bacteria can be destroyed within two hours, but there is no such effect without adding sugar. In addition, there is also such an effect when using drugs combined with Staphylococcus aureus. Researchers are exploring whether this method is also effective for other bacteria that cause tuberculosis and other diseases.
However, researchers have only conducted experiments on animals so far, and further research is needed to confirm whether this method is effective for humans. If the same method applies to humans, it means that better bactericidal effects can be achieved without combining multiple antibiotics or developing new drugs, helping to reduce infections and save medical costs.