Being treated repeatedly with antibiotics within their first two years may set a child up for obesity a little later on in their lives, suggests new research from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The new findings, detailed online in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, were not derived from a direct examination of cause and effect, but rather based on data from electronic health records from the extensive care network maintained by the hospital.

Lead study author Dr. Charles Bailey, noted in a statement that he and his colleagues found that children with four or more exposures to broad spectrum antibiotics during infancy were particularly more likely to be at risk for obesity.

As such, the researchers were intrigued by the emerging idea that the microbial population that begins to colonize in infants' intestines shortly after birth, known as the microbiome, plays an important role in establishing energy metabolism.

Previous studies did indeed demonstrate that exposure to antibiotics influenced the microbiome's diversity and composition.

As pediatricians, Bailey said, "we're interested in whether events that happen early in life might reset the baseline and have a long-term effect on how the body regulates weight ... the thought is that the microbiome may be critically dependent on what is going on during infancy."

The study team analyzed the 2001-2013 electronic health records of 64,580 children with annual visits from ages 0 to 23 months, as well as one or more visits at ages 24 to 59 months within the Hospital's medical network.

The scientists specifically assessed the relationships between antibiotic prescriptions and related diagnoses before age 24 months and the development of obesity in the following three years.

The investigators detected a link between obesity and broad-spectrum drugs, but not narrow-spectrum medications, which, for purposes of the study, included common pediatric disease treatments, such as penicillin and amoxicillin.

Comparatively, they considered broad-spectrum antibiotics to include those recommended in current guidelines as second-line therapy.

"Treating obesity is going to be a matter of finding the collection of things that together have a major effect, even though each alone has only a small effect," said the senior author of the study, Dr. Patricia DeRusso, director of the Healthy Weight Program and vice president of Medical Staff Affairs at CHOP. "Part of what we are exploring in this study is one of those factors that we can possibly modify in the way we take care of kids and make it better."

Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children over the past 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with many continuing to be obese into adulthood and susceptible to an array of potential ailments, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, several types of cancer and osteoarthritis.