Studies conducted on Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria have shown that caffeine may reduce the absorption of antibiotics.
According to the study, drinking one cup of coffee a day may weaken the effectiveness of some antibiotics, such as ciprofloxacin, against E. coli bacteria.
An international team of researchers studied 94 different chemicals and their effects on the systems that control the entry and exit of substances from bacterial cells.
It was found that about a third of the substances tested affected the genes responsible for transporting substances into and out of the cell, but caffeine was the most effective, as it reduced the absorption of some antibiotics by E. coli bacteria, including ciprofloxacin.
The study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, showed that a protein called Rob plays a larger role than previously thought in regulating the transport of substances within bacterial cells, participating in about a third of the changes observed by the researchers, including changes related to the effects of caffeine.
Ana Rita Brugado, a bioengineer from the University of Tübingen in Germany, explains that caffeine triggers a series of changes that begin with modifying the activity of the regulatory gene Rob, which subsequently leads to changes in the function of transport proteins within E. coli bacteria, and thus reduces the absorption of some antibiotics.
It should be noted that these results were based on laboratory experiments, and it remains unclear how this interaction affects the human body or how much coffee is needed to actually impact antibiotic efficacy. The study also indicates that this effect was not observed in some other bacteria, such as Salmonella enterica, suggesting that the response may be specific to certain types of bacteria.
