Lay summary
In New Zealand and around the world, rates of antibiotic resistance in bacteria are rising. This is cause for alarm because once antibiotics stop working, even minor infections can become much more severe. Usually, when we think of how antibiotic resistance happens, the infecting bacteria evade and survive treatment with antibiotics and gain resistance to survive future treatments. However, new research studying how non-antibiotic medicines can cause bacteria to become antibiotic resistant as an unintended side-effect has opened a new area of research. This research looks to see if the highly prescribed group of medicines called antidepressants can increase antibiotic resistance in the body’s natural bacteria, and to determine whether these medicines could be unknowingly making the problem of antibiotic resistance worse. This research has the potential to fundamentally shift our understanding of how antibiotic resistance arises with hopes to reduce it in the future.