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Taking antibiotics for more than six months increases your risk of colon cancer.
The increased risk isn’t enormous—it’s around 17 percent, researchers estimate—but it does highlight the importance of regular screening when people are taking the drug.
Researchers at Umea University in Sweden found a link between antibiotics and colon cancer when they investigated the history of around 40,000 cancer cases.
The cancer can develop between five and 10 years after completing a course of antibiotics, and the risk is greatest in those who had taken the most antibiotics. It attacks the ascending colon, the first part of the colon that food reaches.
It’s already known that antibiotics can wreck the gut microbiome and the researchers think there is an association between that and the heightened cancer risk.
(Source: JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2021; doi: 10.1093/jnci/djab125)
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