Risk for Postcolonoscopy Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Patients with and Without Antibiotic Exposure

A retrospective cohort study recently explored the effect of exposure to antibiotics on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in patients undergoing colonoscopy.1 In this study involving 408,714 individuals, 24,617 (6.0%) individuals were exposed to antibiotics. After using propensity score matching to balance potential confounding factors, the authors found that the incidence of IBS in patients exposed to antibiotics was similar to that of patients who were not exposed to antibiotics (hazard ratio, 1.11; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.89–1.39), but the use of antibiotics was weakly related to the composite outcome (hazard ratio, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.02–1.24).