So without further ado, Professor Geoffrey Watson, professor emeritus of clinical pharmacology.
Would you like to tell us whether antibiotics will make us better? Yeah.
Well, who would like antibiotics to make them pregnant?
Any volunteers here? Anybody and anybody want it?
There's the title and there's Robyn, who is a co-author on this work.
And actually, of course, the title should really be that,
because I'm going to talk about a putative interaction of antibiotics with oral contraceptives primarily,
and this starts in 1971 with a paper in the German literature from Reimers and a later paper by Reimers again in 73,
and then somebody else's paper in 74, all in the German literature saying that this drug rifampicin you can see at the top,
which is used to treat tuberculosis, incidentally, named after the French film Rififi.
Anybody seen Rififi? Do you rififi socialism or Shazaam is a film by Zhu Das, which is about a robbery in Paris.
It won the jury prize at Cannes, and it's how Dessa met Melina mercouri and made his career and the people who first isolated
the rifampicin antibiotics from a particular organism called the culture after rififi.
And they called them River My Sins. And so rifampicin is an MP derivative of the Reformation.
So that's why it's called rifampicin. So what, what they showed was that there is an interaction of rifampicin with the oral contraceptive.
And this made news in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1974.
There's a picture of Reimers,
and this annotation tells you that if you give rifampicin to people who are taken to women who are taking the oral contraceptive,
you get breakthrough bleeding or spotting.
And some women had absence of bleeding after discontinuation of the pill, but had breakthrough bleeding in the following cycle, which is a bit odd.
And even some women became pregnant despite taking the oral contraceptive.
Now the mechanism of this interaction is well-described and totally agreed upon.
Nobody has any difficulty about accepting that this is a true interaction.
My old professor, David Graham Smith, gave a public lecture some years ago talking about this kind of interaction.
He said there are certain drugs which are enzyme inducers.
I'll come back to that and they will reduce the amount of contraceptive you have in your
body and you may therefore become pregnant and a woman in the front row and oh my God.
But it does happen. And here's the mechanism.
This is from a much later paper, but it shows you that rifampicin or rifampin,
as they Americans call it, reduces the amount of oestrogen oestrogen, the IEEE.
On the slide there is ethanol oestradiol one of the common oestrogens used in oral contraceptives.
You can see that when you add ampicillin after 14 days, the concentrations of the ethanol oestradiol reduce by about 50%.
And the same is true of another member of that group refer Biotin, which is another rifampicin.
The effect is less, but nonetheless it occurs. And rifampicin is probably one of the most potent enzyme inducers.
It increases the metabolism of drugs in the liver by increasing the amount of enzyme, and there are many enzyme inducers which do exactly the same,
although two different degrees, and they all tend to reduce the efficacy of the oral contraceptive.
And the first sign is mid-cycle spotting.
You're in the middle of your cycle, you've had a period here, you're expecting a period there, and in the middle you get a little bit of bleeding.
That's the first sign that your contraceptive is failing.
And of course, pregnancy is the most dramatic sign that your contraceptive has failed.
Now, in 1975, this GP, Jill Dorset at the top there wrote a letter to the BMJ and the BMJ.
Hated it. Drug interactions with oral contraceptives. And what she said was, it's well known.
See if I can get this. It's well known that there are drug interactions with these drugs barbiturates, rifampicin, phenol, the Arizona phenytoin.
They all can act as enzyme inducers.
I'm not sure about female beauties being there, but the others are certainly enzyme inducers.
And then she says, But I have seen three cases, three patients who became pregnant when they were given ampicillin.
And she wonders if there might be an interaction with antibiotics that are not enzyme inducers.
The BMJ clearly had pregnancy on its mind because it followed that with another letter about the Dow concealed,
which is also problematic but in a different way.
So at about the same time, in fact, in the same month, November 1975, as Jill Nossiter wrote her letter, a group in Finland,
Adler, CREUTZ and his colleagues had published data on the excretion of oestrogens in the urine of women who are pregnant.
And for some reason they had studied the effects of ampicillin, and this is what they found.
Here you have the pregnant women excreting all these different oestrogens.
These three are probably the most important, and here they are.
These are conjugated oestrogens. I'll come back to that in a minute.
Here they are after ampicillin, huge increases in the excretion in the faeces of conjugated oestrogen.
Now, why is that important?
Well, there is a mechanism that I'll come back to, but remember that ampicillin increases the excretion of conjugated oestrogens in the faeces.
This seems to be a highly variable effect.
These are three patients from another of their papers were actually reproduced in the contraception paper,
but taken from another paper showing that there is huge variability in this effect.
And they've demonstrated here three individuals,
one of whom has an increase in this time plasma and conjugated oestradiol and conjugated one who has no change and one who has a fall.
So there is a huge variability, one assumes, in the extent to which conjugation and conjugation or conjugation occurs in different people.
How this translates into the general population, I don't think anyone knows.
These are just three cases that they showed,
but it does suggest that there's huge variability and that would not be surprising if this is a bacterial effect,
if ampicillin is in some way affecting bacteria in the gut.
And we all have very different microbiomes, the families of bugs that live in our gut.
So variability would not be surprising. So here's the mechanisms we have.
On the left, we have the normal events for oestrogens when you take a dose of the pill.
First of all, the ethanol oestradiol, which is the usual oestrogen in the pill, is absorbed from small.
The people who drew this diagram missed out intestine, not pill, but intestine.
So the ethanol oestradiol is absorbed. You swallow it, it's absorbed from the gut into the systemic circulation.
It's then metabolised in the liver where it is conjugated, joined to glucose,
chronic acid and sulphate, primarily in the liver, also in the intestine.
Drug that isn't conjugated goes to the organs where ovulation occurs and prevents ovulation,
but drug that is conjugated is excreted via the bile back into the gut where bacteria d conjugate
it so that it can be reabsorbed topping up the amount of oestrogen you have in your body.
So the two mechanisms whereby this could potentially be altered is enzyme induction.
You increase the amount of metabolism and so you get less of the oestrogen in the body as a whole.
It's excreted as inactive metabolites or if that doesn't happen.
An antibiotic in the gut can inhibit the bacteria that did conjugate the oestrogen after it's been put from the bile into the gut and reabsorbed.
The de conjugation process necessary for reabsorption is inhibited by removing the D conjugate in bacteria.
And so again, you get less drug in the body.
And that's the importance of the enormous increase in conjugated oestrogens in the gut in the faeces after the administration of ampicillin.
The implication is that ampicillin has inhibited the bacteria which would normally de conjugate the oestrogen,
and so the conjugated oestrogen rises enormously.
The oestrogen is not reabsorbed and you lose the effect of the oestrogen.
So that is the supposed mechanism. Okay.
So now this is a picture of the first issue of the British National Formulary,
which is now the standard text that all prescribers use as their first go to to determine how they should prescribe a medicine.
You will find it on the desk of every general practitioner,
or at least online on the screen when they're prescribing and they'll look up the British National Formulary.
If you go to a coroner's inquest, the coroner will say, what does it say in the BNF?
Or you can go to a trial. They'll say, What does it say in the BNF?
There are other sources of information, of course, important sources, but this is one of the major sources of information.
And here's the first issue from 1981 and all the extracts.
So I'll show you from the various issues of the BNF are taken from the actual hard copies that I've collected over the years.
That's why the quality is not awfully good, because the quality of the original print is not very good.
So here's the extract from the 1981 number one issue on interactions of drugs with oral contraceptives.
And you can see it gives you two sets. One is the drugs that I've mentioned already barbiturates, phenytoin, rifampicin, and so on.
All these drugs are enzyme inducers, and there is total agreement that that reduces the effect of the pill without doubt.
Notice this drug grabs you full, then I'll mention it briefly later.
It's an antifungal drug, not an antibiotic, not an antibacterial drug.
Rifampicin is the only antibacterial drug on this list that's antifungal and the rest are used for other purposes.
But then it says oral antibiotics.
Black It's not enzyme inducers such as ampicillin and tetracycline.
Reduced effect risk, probably small. And the risk was thought to be is not clear.
I don't think anybody really knew and I think nobody still knows what the risk is if there is a risk at all.
So that's 1981. By 1988, when this paper was published, the MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, actually its predecessor,
which was called the Medicines Control Agency, has gathered a whole lot of isolated reports coming in from here, there and everywhere on yellow cards.
You can fill out a yellow card. They used to be actually physical yellow cards available.
GP's would have them and they'd fill out a report saying I suspect that there has been an adverse effect
in this case or an adverse interaction in this case and the yellow card would go into the emkay,
the Medicines Control Agency, and a whole set of reports would be gathered together.
And Alastair Brackenridge and his colleagues in Liverpool looked at all of these in 1988 and they
found that there were 63 reports of alleged interactions with antibiotics and oral contraceptives,
compared with only 43 for antiepileptic drugs.
Now of course there's reporting bias in this and why people should want to
send in an individual report or not send in an individual report is not clear.
And probably less than 10% of all incidents are actually reported in this way.
So it's it's difficult to assess the quality of the data.
But nonetheless,
you can see there were more reports of putative interactions with antibiotics than there were with the anti-epileptic enzyme inducing drugs,
which is suggestive. So now we come to the BNF of 1990.
2/24 edition is published twice yearly, and now for the first time,
the information is increased from the minimal information that you saw in the first
issue took a long time and it says in the case of combined oral contraceptives,
some broad spectrum means they cover a wide range of organisms.
Antibiotics, for example, ampicillin may interfere with oestrogen absorption is not quite right.
It's oestrogen reabsorption after conjugation.
But get the point and it doesn't tell you what the mechanism is supposed to be, just says interferes with absorption.
And it says if you're taking a short course for seven days after and for seven days after stopping,
take extra precautions because your pill may not be as effective.
If the course exceeds two weeks, resistance develops.
And again, they don't say what the mechanism is, but that's the advice being given in 19 can remember 1990 to 1992.
Okay. And this this information persists until 2010 when the information is expanded for the first time.
And here's the information given in 2010,
and it tells tells you again that there is a possible interaction while taking a short course or four and for seven days after stopping.
And that if the course in this case exceeds three weeks. No, not to I don't know why they've changed that.
They say that the bacterial flora develop antibacterial resistance.
So the problem that was started by ampicillin, say,
or tetracycline inhibiting the bacteria is no longer a problem because the bacteria are no longer inhibited and grow back.
And so the status quo is restored. And they say, in addition, that this may also apply to patches and vaginal rings,
although there's not a lot of information about that actually if you look for it.
So that's 2010. But already in 2009, just before the publication of that BNF,
the W.H.O. had looked at the data and had decided that there was no evidence of an interaction.
And this is their fourth edition of the medical eligibility criteria for contraceptive use.
And you can see that at the top broad spectrum antibiotics.
Most broad spectrum antibiotics do not affect the contraceptive effectiveness of combined oral contraceptives.
This is a curious statement because they say most antibiotics, which suggests that maybe some broad spectrum antibiotics do,
but they don't say which, even if they think that some might.
So it's hard to know what that means. I also draw your attention to the second entry on antifungals.
No clinically significant directions, but you remember that I told you that crazy, awful thing, which is an enzyme inducer, is an antifungal agent.
So there is evidence that at least one antifungal agent that has an interaction which they seem to have ignored in this survey,
I won't go into the others, but they do mention rifampicin a bit in the the metabolism and so on.
Here's let's 2009 too early or too late rather for the 2010 issue of the BNF to pick that up.
But the following year, in 2011, this group from the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health Care of the Royal College of
Obstetricians and Gynaecologists published a report in which they echoed the W.H.O. advice.
And this is what they say. They say rifampicin like drugs,
enzyme inducers that are the only antibiotics that are enzyme inducers have consistently been
shown to reduce serum concentrations of ethanol oestradiol with the other antimicrobial agents,
penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, fluoroquinolones and midazolam.
Antifungal drugs, which I'm not going to talk about, which are not enzyme inducers.
The mechanism is supposed to be through inhibiting colonic bacteria, but they say there is no evidence to prove such an interaction.
What they mean is there's no evidence to prove such a mechanism for such an interaction that
they've made that kind of leap without really considering the evidence properly in our review.
Anyway, that's what they said. There's no evidence. But then they go on to say that previously, well, we weren't sure.
And so we were precautionary. It's a big event.
Becoming pregnant. If you hadn't intended to be life changing, so why wouldn't you take precautions in case for a two week course of antibiotics?
It might change your life. Wouldn't you take precautions?
But no. They say we don't think it's necessary. That alone to me is worrying.
Even if I even if I agreed with their assessment of the evidence, I'd be worried about that,
because as long as there is a smallest doubt, proving a negative is not possible.
And that's what they are assuming. They're assuming that the negative has been proven and the precautions are not needed.
That alone gives me pause. And they then mentioned that the shows already said this, as I've shown.
And the US medical eligibility criteria for contraceptive use have agreed they've adopted the recommendations.
So they feel that they should do so too. And later that year, in September 2011,
the BNF picks this up and says latest recommendations are that no additional contraceptive precautions are required.
I was on the British National Formulary Committee at that time.
Normally what would happen is that the pharmacists on that committee would bring suggestions to the committee for ratification.
That didn't happen. They just put this in straight from the college.
Well, College of Obstetricians guidance without consultation as far as I can see.
I may be wrong about that. And I was very upset about this when I heard I said this is this.
Even if even if the evidence is the way it is, I would still recommend taking precautions.
Why not? But there you are.
And that is, I think, in the current guidance. So what was the evidence?
Well, the college divided the evidence into two types, direct and indirect.
This is the direct evidence. Several studies looked at combined hormonal methods have not demonstrated a decrease in levels concentrations of ethanol.
Stradale I'll come back to that. It's an important point. Small Nonrandomized studies no effects on pharmacokinetics.
Small prospective Nonrandomized studies failed to show any effect on gonadotropin.
The hormones that control certain aspects of pregnancy and three small randomised trials suggest that those two drugs may not affect.
And when we look at those trials, this is the number of individuals in each of the trials.
The study number is you see the top one is 57 to 59.
So that's those three references and so on. You can see the three randomised trials, a 64 to 65, they have a total of 54 subjects in all.
That's 27 in each group. Tiny study.
You could not conclude from this that there was no interaction,
but I don't know what the power of the studies would be, but it ain't going to be very high.
So the direct evidence is not very good.
I want to have now an interlude to discuss the question of whether all women would be affected by this interaction if it occurred.
Because the assumption has been looking at the evidence that the W.H.O. and the
Royal College of Obstetricians has quoted that every woman would be affected.
And that is generally the case with interactions.
If I give you a drug that induces liver enzymes, then there will be variability from individual to individual.
But everybody will have some enzyme induction to some extent, and everybody will therefore be at risk of some sort.
Some will be more effective than others, of course, and the distribution of risk will be a normal distribution, generally speaking.
And the general assumption is that adverse interactions behave in that way,
that although there is variability, everybody is at risk of some degree or other.
That doesn't necessarily happen with some interactions.
And it is particularly not the case when bacteria are involved because of the huge variability in bacterial flora in our guts.
And this is an example that demonstrates this.
So it's an interlude from oral contraceptives and this is a report of an interaction of digoxin, which is we don't use nowadays very much, if at all.
It's a cardiac drug with an antibiotic erythromycin.
And in this case, it caused toxicity.
This is the first case report that this is so and this has proved to be a correct assumption that this drug erythromycin can,
in some women cause some men and indeed in some people cause digoxin toxicity.
And it does it by changing the metabolism of d Jackson in the gut mediated by a bacterium called you bacterium Lenton.
And this bacterium is responsible for changing the structure of digoxin to inactive compounds.
So here's the structure of the Jackson. It looks like a steroid.
This bit here is a steroid. So it's not unrelated to the oestrogen and progesterone.
Although the three dimensional structure is different.
And this bit of the molecule is called the genuine.
So the whole molecule is digoxin. This bit is called digoxin genuine because it gives rise to the whole molecule.
These things each are glucose like molecules, and so the whole structure is known as a cardiac glycosides.
It's a drug that acts on the heart and has glucose like molecules in it.
And this group of compounds that are many of them are called cardiac glycosides.
So digoxin is a cardiac glycosides. And as it's metabolised in the body, each one of these glucose molecules is snipped off.
Now, usually when you metabolise a chemical, it makes it less potent.
But in the case of cardiac glycosides, removing each of the molecules of glucose like molecules increases the activity of the drug.
They become more potent. But if you change this bit here by reducing the double bond, putting hydrogen molecules on you, reduce the activity.
So there are varying changes in the activity of the molecule, depending on which bit of it is metabolised.
And when you add that, when you put it in the presence of the you bacterium, you get a whole load of active of inactive compounds.
Sorry. Here's the normal metabolism to a variant of a variety of active compounds you put in the you bacterium and you get inactive compounds.
If you inhibit the you bacterium, you get more active compounds and therefore toxicity.
Only 10% of people are subject to this interaction, but 20 or 30% have the bacterium.
And with the variability, about 10% actually get the interaction.
So this is a very good example of how interactions with bacteria where an antibiotic changes.
In this case, the metabolism of a drug only affects a small number of individuals.
In this case, about 10%. Does not affect everybody.
And even of those whom it affects, not everybody is going to be at risk of toxicity because of the variability in those individuals.
So what I one wondered in relation to the numbers of individuals who had been studied in those.
Study as I show you before. How many such individuals would you need if you wanted to demonstrate that there was an interaction?
Most interaction studies only have a dozen or so people.
24 was the most in those studies I showed you. Is that enough to show an effect if it affects, say, only 10% of the population?
Now you'll know. The answer to that straight away is obviously far too few.
But I thought I'd do the sums just to convince myself.
And what I've done here is to set up the putative results of a randomised experiment.
And I've said, right, we've got a group of women who are taking the oral contraceptive.
I'm going to give half of them an antibiotic and the other half a placebo to be double blind.
Nobody will know what's going on. And then I'm going to watch and see how many of them become pregnant and how many of them don't.
Not an ethical experiment, but just a thought experiment.
And I want to know, how big is X?
If one of the women in the placebo group becomes pregnant because people do become pregnant despite taking oral contraceptives.
And if 1/10 of the women in the antibiotic group become pregnant because that's the risk, 10%.
So here's some numbers I've said. Well, suppose I studied 30 women.
1530 in each group bigger than any of the other studies.
And one of them in the placebo group became pregnant.
Three of them, 10% in this group became pregnant.
You might say that should before because there's one there and one should be there.
But roughly what do you get?
Well, there's the chi square, nowhere near significant, as you all doubtless expected.
So my question to you is how many people should I study in this paradigm if I want to find a P value less than 0.05?
Anybody got any ideas? If they want to make a suggestion?
500 500 in each group are to 50 in total to 50 in each group.
Yeah. Any advance on that? Is that.
Does that sound right? Sounds good. Susanna says here roughly.
Yeah. It's not bad, actually. It's not a bad.
I've doubled the numbers here, 60 in each group and it just almost gets to be significant and I really want better than that.
So 250 in each group. Yeah. It might be. Could be.
There's that sort of order. We need 100, 200, 300 in each group before I'm going to expect to detect this effect on the assumption of a 10% risk.
It might be less than that. The risk might be less. Might be one one in 100.
Still be important to that one individual.
And how many millions of women take contraceptives and some of them come through the course of antibiotics because of a urinary tract infection.
So you need quite a lot. One of my colleagues in the department in the statistics group said, well, she said,
if you wanted to do a study in which you gave advice to women about what they should do when you gave them an antibiotic,
you would need a huge study to determine whether there was an interaction in that scenario.
This is a much simpler scenario. I'm actually counting. I'm watching them day by day and counting the pregnancies.
If I just gave them advice to take extra precautions, you'd need a much bigger study to determine whether your advice was helpful or not.
And that's the practical problem, actually, in a way. How do you advise women what to do?
So not very good. The direct so-called direct evidence.
And then there's some indirect evidence. I'm not going to go through it in detail, but they have seven pieces of indirect evidence.
And we've analysed these pieces and none of them is very strong.
They're all circumstantial or illogical in one way or another.
I just want to put up the first one of these.
It's the statement that women who have had a colectomy and ileostomy have no intrahepatic circulation because there's no de conjugation,
no no excretion or whatever.
That's supposedly the the idea. So you get drug.
Conjugated drug excreted and not D conjugated because there's no de conjugation going on.
There's no gut to do it, and yet the efficacy does not appear to be reduced.
They say, well, actually that's not true.
There's a a letter here and a study later showing that this does, in fact, reduce the amount of the amount of oestrogen that you have in your body.
Equally important, and the reason I put this up is because it makes a statement that nobody, I think has considered,
and that is that in these patients they studied who were given antibiotics, there was a change in sex, steroid binding globulin.
Now, all the studies of oestrogens in these all the work that's been done in these studies has been on total oestrogen concentrations,
not the unbound concentration. It's the unbound concentration that's active.
So it's possible that you might have no change in total oestrogen concentration,
but a change in a small fraction of unbound concentration, which would be important.
Nobody has ever considered that as far as we can see.
Incidentally, it's these oestrogens are not banned ethanol.
These $2 are not bound to globulin, they're bound to see them albumin, but about 98%.
So if I, I usually when I'm teaching students about this, I talk about my pocket money problem.
My father comes home with £100 in his pay packet.
Well, nowadays it's a thousand or whatever, £100 in his pay packet.
He gives my mother £98 to run the house and he gives me £2 pocket money.
One week he comes home, he says, Geoff, I'm sorry, we've got extra expenses.
It's not very much. Your mother needs £99 this week.
And I say, you what? You've just reduced my pocket money from £2 to £1.
A 50% reduction in my pocket money for your £1 extra expense and the over 98.
So that's devastating. Same is true of bound and unbound.
If your drug is 98% pound, then a small change in the unbound can produce an enormous change in effect, and that could easily happen with ethanol.
The stradale which is 98% band to see them out them.
That has not, to our knowledge, been studied. Another important point about all these studies is that they have chosen to look at surrogate markers.
They've looked at total ethanol oestradiol concentrations as a surrogate marker,
although they don't seem to appreciate it for unbound ethanol oestradiol.
And that in itself is a surrogate marker for the action of the oral contraceptive and for pregnancy, which is the important outcome.
So nobody has done a study of pregnancy outcomes, so we thought we ought to do that.
And we go back to the yellow card reports that I mentioned before with all the
problems that they entail and now instead of sending in yellow cards by post,
you can fill it in online. All the data have been gathered together, digitised, whatever,
and you can get it all through the MHRA website and this website called Interactive Drug Analysis Profiles and the Internet.
These this interactive drug analysis profiles tell you we have received 60,000 reports on this drug and there are 2000 cases of headache,
3000 of this, 4000 to that 100 of the other.
And you can add them all up and see if there are any differences. So we decided to look at unintended pregnancies as an outcome in this database,
and we chose to amalgamate the data from nine broad spectrum antibiotics.
There they are listed and we chose to comparing to competitor groups.
We chose negative controls. We took nine drugs at random from a formulary.
And these are all drugs that women of childbearing age might from time to time be expected to take for one reason or another.
Citalopram is an antidepressant. Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory drug.
Lansoprazole is for, let's call it dyspepsia and so on, paracetamol, theophylline for asthma, zolpidem to help you sleep, whatever.
So these are negative controls.
We would not expect these drugs to make you more susceptible to pregnancy when you're taking the oral contraceptive and the.
Then we looked at a group of positive controls.
These are the enzyme inducers that we know should increase your risk.
So we expect these 12 drugs as a group to increase the risk of unintended pregnancies compared with the controls.
That's our expectation. If we don't find that, then there's something wrong with our study.
We don't know what the relationship between these two groups would be.
So that's what we're trying to find out. And we are, in fact, trying to prove the null hypothesis that there is no interaction of antibiotics.
With supposed oral contraceptives through the measure of unintended pregnancies.
We've also looked at a range of events, adverse events, not merely unintended pregnancies.
That's our outcome of interest. We've looked at two negative events negative control events, cardiac arrhythmias and headache.
We do not expect any of the three groups to affect these at all.
The negative controls we've looked at congenital abnormalities.
This is a positive control. We expect that the enzyme inducers should increase the risk of congenital abnormalities.
We expect that if we don't find it, then there's something wrong because not all of the enzyme induces,
but quite a few of them are known to cause congenital abnormalities.
So that's our positive control. And then we've got a confounder or a potential confounder in the mix diarrhoea,
because if an antibiotic causes diarrhoea, it may hurry the pill through the gut and you don't absorb it.
And diarrhoea is known to be a risk factor for failure of the pill.
So if we see an interaction or an effect of diarrhoea, then that might be a confounder for our antibiotics.
Effect might explain explain the apparent effect of antibiotics.
It's due to diarrhoea, not due to the mechanism of inhibiting the conjugation.
So that's why we chose all those and we could have chosen others. But there's only so much time in the day.
So now what were the results? There they are.
There's the controls. Just look at the unwanted pregnancies. Five out of 60,000 reports, five out of 60,000 unintended pregnancies, I should say.
These these are data we got on our first passage through the the database.
We've since updated them with the latest and the results are very similar.
Here are antibiotics of 45 out of about the same number, 68,000.
So that's many times more than with the controls.
And here's our positive controls, 39 out of half the number.
So try doubling that 78, roughly out of 60,000.
So you're beginning to see the pattern emerge.
You might also want to look at the congenital abnormalities 819 and I'll show you 179 with the antibiotics and 234 with the controls.
So many more with the enzyme inducers as we expected.
So here's the summary 545 and 39.
Hard to know what's going on. Diarrhoea certainly isn't increased.
We thought we were a little surprised. We thought the antibiotics might increase the risk of diarrhoea.
It doesn't seem to why the enzyme induces a lower, I don't know, but I suspect that the confidence intervals are quite wide on that.
I'll show you that. And nothing much again with the cardiac arrhythmias, the congenital ones,
clearly a signal coming from the enzyme inducers and not much from the headache.
So when we look at these per 100,000,
we can see that the ratios for the antibiotics is about eight times the controls and 14 times for the enzyme inducers.
So we have the expected effect with the enzyme inducers a very large effect.
And that's the answer to our question about antibiotics, not as big an effect, but nonetheless an effect.
And the confidence intervals on the raw data do not overlap.
It's really quite striking. And here's the congenital abnormalities.
The signal comes from the enzyme inducers and not from the antibiotics as expected, which is what it should be.
And if we hadn't seen that, we would have doubted the results.
But that's what comes out. And the others really are nowhere.
The ratios are all under one, one or less.
So we think that this is and there's the there's the data highlighted.
So we think this is evidence of an interaction and certainly one that constitutes a signal that ought to be looked at further,
perhaps in other databases. There are, of course, problems with the database.
These are spontaneous reports, people just sending in reports when they see something happening.
And there is undoubtedly going to be a risk of report.
Bias, but we think that the positive and negative controls we've used minimises the risk of that.
But we can't rule it out entirely. But the data do suggest that antibiotics increase the risk of unintended pregnancies.
Certainly the evidence that there's no risk is very weak and in our view,
ought to be disregarded and bone concentrations should be measured if you're using that particular surrogate marker.
And whatever you think, actually, it's our view that the precautionary principle should apply.
And there is the precautionary principle. I'll read it out.
If an action or policy has a suspected risk or suspected risk of causing harm and the absence of consensus.
The burden of proof falls on those taking that action.
In other words, the burden of proof that there is no interaction falls on the obstetricians and while they cannot prove it definitively.
The precautionary principle, in our view, should apply. QED.
Thank you.