Your gut’s “village” of bacteria may protect you against C. difficile infection – or not.
Like a collection of ragtag villagers fighting off an invading army, the mix of bacteria that live in our guts may band together to keep dangerous infections from taking hold, new research suggests.
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But some “villages” may succeed better than others at holding off the invasion, because of key differences in the kinds of bacteria that make up their feisty population, the team from theUniversity of Michigan Medical School reports.
The researchers even show it may be possible to predict which collections of gut bacteria will resist invasion the best — opening the door to new ways of aiding them in their fight.
…these models could serve as a diagnostic tool, to predict which patients will need the most protection against C-diff before they go to the hospital, or even to custom-design a protective dose of bacteria before or after a C-diff exposure.
In other words, to see which villages need the most reinforcements to prevail in battle.
Community matters
Schloss, who is a key member of the Medical School’s Host Microbiome Initiative, notes that no one species of bacteria by itself protected against colonization. It was the mix that did it. And no one particular mix of specific bacteria was spectacularly better than others – several of the diverse “villages” resisted invasion.
Resistance was associated with members of the Porphyromonadaceae, Lachnospiraceae, Lactobacillus, Alistipes, and Turicibacter families of bacteria. Susceptibility to C. difficile, on the other hand, was associated with loss of these protective species and a rise in Escherichia or Streptococcus bacteria.
“It’s the community that matters, and antibiotics screw it up,” Schloss explains. Being able to use advance genetic tools to detect the DNA of dozens of different bacteria species, and tell how common or rare each one is in a particular gut, made this research possible.
Clostridium difficile bacteria kill thousands of Americans each year.
Then, this massive amount of information about the villages of bacteria present in each of the mice in the experiment, and the relative success of each village in fighting off C-diff, was fed into the computer model created by the team.
IMAGE: BÄCKHED ET AL. ASSESSED THE GUT MICROBIOMES OF 98 SWEDISH MOTHERS AND THEIR INFANTS DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE. CESSATION OF BREAST-FEEDING WAS IDENTIFIED AS A MAJOR FACTOR IN DETERMINING GUT MICROBIOTA MATURATION, WITH… view more
CREDIT: BÄCKHED ET AL./CELL HOST & MICROBE2015
A fecal sample analysis of 98 Swedish infants over the first year of life found a connection between the development of a child’s gut microbiome and the way he or she is delivered. Babies born via C-section had gut bacteria that showed significantly less resemblance to their mothers compared to those that were delivered vaginally.
The study, which appears May 11 in Cell Host & Microbe‘s special issue on “The Host-Microbiota Balance,” also found nutrition to be a main driver of infant gut microbiome development–specifically the decision to breast-feed or bottle-feed.
“Our findings surprisingly demonstrated that cessation of breastfeeding, rather than introduction of solid foods, is the major driver in the development of an adult-like microbiota,” says lead study author Fredrik Bäckhed of The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “However, the effect of an altered microbiome early in life on health and disease in adolescence and adulthood remains to be demonstrated.”
Gut bacteria are suspected to be a source of nutrients and vitamins for a growing infant. Our intestinal tenants are able to interact with normal cellular processes to, for example, produce essential amino acids. Understanding the role individual gut microbes play in metabolism, immunity, and even behavior is an active area of investigation.
TMAO Found To Be A Contributing Factor To Development Of Chronic Kidney Disease And Associated Mortality Risk
Thursday, January 29th
Cleveland Clinic researchers have, for the first time, linked trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) – a gut metabolite formed during the digestion of egg-, red meat- or dairy-derived nutrients choline and carnitine – to chronic kidney disease.
TMAO has been linked to heart disease already, with blood levels shown to be a powerful tool for predicting future heart attacks, stroke and death. TMAO forms in the gut during digestion of choline and carnitine, nutrients that are abundant in animal products such as red meat and liver. Choline is also abundant in egg yolk and high-fat dairy products.
The research team was led by Stanley Hazen, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine for the Lerner Research Institute and section head of Preventive Cardiology & Rehabilitation in the Miller Family Heart and Vascular Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and W.H. Wilson Tang, MD, Department of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Miller Family Heart and Vascular Institute and Lerner Research Institute. The research will be published online on January 29th and in the January 30th print edition of Circulation Research .
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more that 20 million Americans are estimated to have chronic kidney disease, many of whom are undiagnosed. It is caused by a gradual loss of kidney function over time. As the disease worsens, waste products can accumulate in the blood and can be fatal without interventions. It has long been known that patients with chronic kidney disease are at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, but the exact mechanisms linking the two diseases are not known. This newly discovered TMAO link offers further insight into the relationship between cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease.
CAPTION Journal of Medicinal Food is an authoritative, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal published monthly in print and online. Led by Editors-in-Chief Sampath Parthasarathy, MBA, PhD, and Young-Eun Lee, PhD, Wonkwang University, Jeonbuk, Korea, this scientific journal publishes original scientific research on the bioactive substances of functional and medicinal foods, nutraceuticals, herbal substances, and other natural products. The Journal explores the chemistry and biochemistry of these substances, as well as the methods for their extraction and analysis, the use of biomarkers and other methods to assay their biological roles, and the development of bioactive substances for commercial use. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Journal of Medicinal Food website.
New Rochelle, NY, January 21, 2015–The hundred trillion bacteria living in an adult human–mostly in the intestines, making up the gut microbiome–have a significant impact on behavior and brain health. The many ways gut bacteria can impact normal brain activity and development, affect sleep and stress responses, play a role in a variety of diseases, and be modified through diet for therapeutic use are described in a comprehensive Review article in Journal of Medicinal Food, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The paper is available free on the Journal of Medicinal Food website until February 21, 2015.
In “The Gut Microbiome and the Brain”, Leo Galland, Foundation for Integrated Medicine (New York, NY), presents the most up-to-date understanding of the relationship between the proteins produced by intestinal bacteria and the human central nervous system. The author explores the various mechanisms through which the microbiome can influence the brain: by stimulating and over-stimulating the immune system, producing neurotoxic agents, releasing hormones or neurotransmitters identical to those made by the human body, or through direct neuronal stimulation that sends signals to the brain.
“The microbiome has become a hot topic in many branches of medicine, from immune and inflammatory diseases, such as Crohn’s and IBD to cardiovascular diseases,” says Co-Editor-in-Chief Sampath Parthasarathy, MBA, PhD, Florida Hospital Chair in Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Central Florida, Orlando. “Scientists are not only aware of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ microbes in the gut but are becoming increasingly aware of how they could alter the metabolism beyond gut.”
ATLANTA—Promoting healthy gut microbiota, the bacteria that live in the intestine, can help treat or prevent metabolic syndrome, a combination of risk factors that increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Cornell University.
Their findings are published in the journal Gastroenterology.
The study, a follow-up to the research team’s previous paper in Science, uses an improved technical approach, making the results more significant.
The research team includes Dr. Andrew Gewirtz, a professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State; Dr. Benoit Chassaing, a post-doctoral student at Georgia State; and Dr. Ruth Ley of the departments of Microbiology and Molecular Biology at Cornell.
“These results suggest that developing a means to promote a more healthy microbiota can treat or prevent metabolic disease,” Gewirtz said. “They confirm the concept that altered microbiota can promote low-grade inflammation and metabolic syndrome and advance the underlying mechanism. We showed that the altered bacterial population is more aggressive in infiltrating the host and producing substances, namely flagellin and lipopolysaccharide, that further promote inflammation.”
Metabolic syndrome is a serious health condition that affects 34 percent of American adults, according to the American Heart Association. A person is diagnosed with metabolic syndrome when he or she has three of these risk factors: a large waistline, high triglyceride (type of fat found in the blood) level, low HDL cholesterol level, high blood pressure and high fasting blood sugar. A person with metabolic syndrome is twice as likely to develop heart disease and five times as likely to develop diabetes, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Because metabolic syndrome is becoming more common, scientists are exploring possible causes. In their previous study in Science, Gewirtz, Ley and other researchers showed altered gut microbiota play a role in promoting metabolic syndrome.
Gut microbiota perform key functions in health and when it becomes deregulated it can promote chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. In addition, altered gut microbiota promote inflammation that leads to metabolic syndrome.
“We’ve filled in a lot of the details about how it works,” Gewirtz said. “It’s the loss of TLR5 on the epithelium, the cells that line the surface of the intestine and their ability to quickly respond to bacteria. That ability goes away and results in a more aggressive bacterial population that gets closer in and produces substances that drive inflammation.”
Normally, the bacteria are in the mucous layer at a certain distance away from epithelial cells. The researchers showed altered gut microbiota is more aggressive in infiltrating the host and gets very close to the epithelium. This altered population produces flagellin and lipopolysaccharide, which further promote inflammation.
The research team improved the study by comparing mice that were siblings and littermates, making all conditions in the study the same. The mice only differed by whether they were missing a specific gene, TLR5. Previously, the researchers studied mice that were from two different strains and lived in separate environments. In this study, they found the absence of TLR5 on the intestinal surface leads to alterations in bacteria that drive inflammation, leading to metabolic syndrome.
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.
In 2001, Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, coined the term “microbiome,” naming the trillions of microorganisms that reside in and on our bodies. Today, if you type that word into Google, you’ll turn up thousands of hits linking gut bacteria to a laundry list of health problems, from food allergies to Ebola. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of journal articles published on the microbiome increased by nearly 250 percent. Our bodily inhabitants are quickly being cast as culprits or saviors for a diverse array of ailments.
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Still, despite the optimism, some researchers caution that much of what we hear about microbiome science isn’t always, well, science. Dr. Lita Proctor heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Human Microbiome Project (HMP), an outgrowth of the Human Genome Project. “We are discovering a whole new ecosystem,” she says. But “I do have some fear—we all do in the field—that the hype and the potential overpromise, and the idea that somehow this is going to be different—there is a terrific fear that it will all backfire.”
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he goal of the first phase of the HMP was to identify the microbial makeup of a “healthy” microbiome. And, in a study published earlier this year, researchers made an important discovery—that there is no such thing. Even among people who were examined and found to be perfectly healthy, each person’s microbiome was unique.
“We were going about it all wrong,” Proctor explains. “It is not the makeup—these communities come together and they actually become bigger than the sum of their parts…It almost doesn’t matter who is present, it just matters what they are doing.”
Jonathan Eisen, a professor and biologist who studies the ecology of microbes at the University of California-Davis, shares Proctor’s concerns. In a series on his blog called “The Overselling the Microbiome Awards,” Eisen highlights what he considers to be skewed science. He has taken on transplants purported to treat multiple sclerosis, celiac disease, and Crohn’s disease. He casts doubt on a study claiming there’s a connection between a mother’s oral hygiene during pregnancy to the health of her newborn. He critiques the notion that you can use bacteria to battle breast cancer, prevent stroke, and cure Alzheimer’s.
Eisen says that one of the most common errors in studies is confusion between correlation and causation. [My emphasis!] “The microbiome has 400 million different variables that you can measure about it,” Eisen explains. “The different sites, the different species, the relative abundance of those species, the variation—if you have that many variables, I can guarantee statistically that some of them will be perfectly correlated with Crohn’s disease and have nothing to do with it.”
The time-course of an immune response begins with the initial pathogen encounter, (or initial vaccination) and leads to the formation and maintenance of active immunological memory. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that many diseases are triggered or maintained by changes in bacterial communities in the gut. However, the general view up into now has been rather simple: bacteria stimulate the immune system, leading to inflammation or autoimmune disorders in a single direction.
Now, in work published in Immunity, scientists led by Sidonia Fagarasan from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Science in Japan have painted a more complex picture: the gut immune system does not simply prevent the influx of pathogens, but is actively involved in the maintenance of a rich and healthy community of gut bacteria. They propose that faults in the immune regulation lead to changes in the bacterial community that in turn feed back into the immune system.
In the study, the group demonstrated that the regulation by immune T cells of immunoglobulin A (IgA), an antibody that plays a key role in immunity in the gut, is critical for the maintenance of rich bacterial communities in mammal guts.
They began by studying mice with various immune deficiencies and attempted to restore the mice by providing the missing components. They monitored the bacterial communities in the mice’s guts with or without the reconstitutions and evaluated the flow of information between the immune system and bacteria. They discovered that the precise control of IgA production by regulatory T cells is critical for keeping a rich and balanced bacterial community.
To investigate how bacteria feed back to the host, they looked at germ-free mice (mice born and maintained sterile in special incubators) and young pups that had been transplanted with different bacterial communities (either by injection of bacteria or by painting the fur with fecal bacteria extracts from normal or immune-deficient mice). They discovered that the immune system “sees” and responds differently to different bacterial communities. Rich and balanced bacterial communities seem to be perceived as “self” and induce a quick maturation of the immune system and gut responses (induction of regulatory T cells and IgA), while a poor and unbalanced bacterial community is apparently perceived as “non-self” and induces responses aimed at eliminating it (T cells with inflammatory properties and IgG or IgE responses).
According to Sidonia Fagarasan, who led the work, “This study should have an impact on the way we understand immune-related disorders associated with bacteria dysbiosis in the gut. In order to reestablish a healthy state we need to interfere not only with the bacteria, by providing probiotics or through fecal transplantation, but also with the immune system, by correcting the faults caused either by inherited deficiencies or by aging.”
“It was surprising,” she continues, “to see how the reconstitution of T cell-deficient mice with a special regulatory T cell type leads to dramatic changes in gut bacterial communities. It was spectacular to see how the immune system perceives and reacts to different bacteria communities. It gives us hopes that with a better knowledge of the symbiotic relationships between the immune system and bacteria in the gut, we could intervene and induce modifications aiming to reestablish balance and restore health.”
The bacteria in our guts can influence the working of the mind, says Frank Swain. So could they be upgraded to enhance brainpower?
I have some startling news: you are not human. At least, by some counts. While you are indeed made up of billions of human cells working in remarkable concert, these are easily outnumbered by the bacterial cells that live on and in you – your microbiome. There are ten of them for every one of your own cells, and they add an extra two kilograms (4.4lbs) to your body.
Far from being freeloading passengers, many of these microbes actively help digest food and prevent infection. And now evidence is emerging that these tiny organisms may also have a profound impact on the brain too. They are a living augmentation of your body – and like any enhancement, this means they could, in principle, be upgraded. So, could you hack your microbiome to make yourself healthier, happier, and smarter too?
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“Diet is perhaps the biggest factor in shaping the composition of the microbiome,” he says. A study by University College Cork researcherspublished in Nature in 2012 followed 200 elderly people over the course of two years, as they transitioned into different environments such as nursing homes. The researchers found that their subjects’ health – frailty, cognition, and immune system – all correlated with their microbiome. From bacterial population alone, researchers could tell if a patient was a long-stay patient in a nursing home, or short-stay, or living in the general community. These changes were a direct reflection of their diet in these different environments. “A diverse diet gives you a diverse microbiome that gives you a better health outcome,” says Cryan.
Beyond a healthy and varied diet, though, it still remains to be discovered whether certain food combinations could alter the microbiome to produce a cognitive boost. In fact, Cryan recommends that claims from probiotic supplements of brain-boosting ought to be taken with a pinch of salt for now. “Unless the studies have been done, one can assume they’re not going to have any effect on mental health,” he says. Still, he’s optimistic about the future. “The field right now is evolving very strongly and quickly. There’s a lot of important research to be done. It’s still early days.”
Scientists at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have promoted health and increased lifespan in Drosophila by altering the symbiotic, or commensal, relationship between bacteria and the absorptive cells lining the intestine. The research, appearing in the January 16, 2014 edition of Cell, provides a model for studying many of the dysfunctions that are characteristic of the aging gut and gives credence to the growing supposition that having the right balance of gut bacteria may be key to enjoying a long healthy life.
Even though recent research in humans has linked the composition of gut flora with diet and health in the elderly and the list of age-related diseases associated with changes in gut bacteria include cancer, diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease, lead author and Buck faculty Heinrich Jasper, PhD, says there is no systematic understanding of how we go from having a young, healthy gut to one that is old and decrepit. “Our study explores age-related changes in the gut that include increased oxidative stress, inflammation, impaired efficiency of the immune response, and the over-proliferation of stem cells,” said Jasper. “It puts these changes into a hierarchical, causal relationship and highlights the points where we can intervene to rescue the negative results of microbial imbalance.”
With all the talk lately about how the bacteria in the gut affect health and disease, it’s beginning to seem like they might be in charge of our bodies. But we can have our say, by what we eat. For the first time in humans, researchers have shown that a radical change in diet can quickly shift the microbial makeup in the gut and also alter what those bacteria are doing. The study takes a first step toward pinpointing how these microbes, collectively called the gut microbiome, might be used to keep us healthy.
“It’s a landmark study,” says Rob Knight, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved with the work. “It changes our view of how rapidly the microbiome can change.”
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n 2009, Peter Turnbaugh, a microbiologist at Harvard University, demonstrated in mice that a change in diet affected the microbiome in just a day. So he and Lawrence David, now a computational biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, decided to see if diet could have an immediate effect in humans as well. They recruited 10 volunteers to eat only what the researchers provided for 5 days. Half ate only animal products—bacon and eggs for breakfast; spareribs and brisket for lunch; salami and a selection of cheeses for dinner, with pork rinds and string cheese as snacks. The other half consumed a high-fiber, plants-only diet with grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables. For the several days prior to and after the experiment, the volunteers recorded what they ate so the researchers could assess how food intake differed.
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Within each diet group, differences between the microbiomes of the volunteers began to disappear. The types of bacteria in the guts didn’t change very much, but the abundance of those different types did, particularly in the meat-eaters, David, Turnbaugh, and their colleagues report online today in Nature. In 4 days, bacteria known to tolerate high levels of bile acids increased significantly in the meat-eaters. (The body secretes more bile to digest meat.) Gene activity, which reflects how the bacteria were metabolizing the food, also changed quite a bit. In those eating meat, genes involved in breaking down proteins increased their activity, while in those eating plants, other genes that help digest carbohydrates surfaced. “What was really surprising is that the gene [activity] profiles conformed almost exactly to what [is seen] in herbivores and carnivores,” David says. This rapid shift even occurred in the long-term vegetarian who switched to meat for the study, he says. “I was really surprised how quickly it happened.”
From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that gut bacteria can help buffer the effects of a rapid change in diet, quickly revving up different metabolic capacities depending on the meal consumed, may have been quite helpful for early humans, David says. But this flexibility also has possible implications for health today.
“This is a very important aspect of a very hot area of science,” writes Colin Hill, a microbiologist at University College Cork in Ireland, who was not involved with the work. “Perhaps by adjusting diet, one can shape the microbiome in a way that can promote health,” …
While many bacteria exist as aggressive pathogens, causing diseases ranging from tuberculosis and cholera, to plague, diphtheria and toxic shock syndrome, others play a less malevolent role and some are critical for human health.
In a new study, Cheryl Nickerson and her group at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, in collaboration with an international team including Tom Van de Wiele and lead author Rosemarie De Weirdt at Ghent University, Belgium, explore the role of Lactobaccilus reuteri — a natural resident of the human gut — to protect against foodborne infection.
Their results demonstrate that this beneficial or probiotic organism, which produces an antimicrobial substance known as reuterin, may protect intestinal epithelial cells from infection by the foodborne bacterial pathogen Salmonella….
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Bacterial Blizzard
A swarm of some hundred trillion bacteria occupies the human body, outnumbering human cells by about 10 to 1. Among these are members of the genus Lactobacilli, some of which have been associated with therapeutic, probiotic properties, including anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity.
The current study zeros in on Lactobacillus reuteri — one of the more than 180 species of Lactobacilli. The group investigated the potential of this bacterium to inhibit the early stages ofSalmonella infection, seeking to identify plausible mechanisms for such inhibitory effects.
Intestinal infections by non-typhoidal Salmonella strains induce diarrhea and gastroenteritis, and remain a leading source of foodborne illness worldwide. Such infections are acutely unpleasant but self-limiting in healthy individuals. For those with compromised immunity however, they can be deadly and the alarming incidence of multi-drug resistant Salmonellastrains has underlined the necessity of more effective therapeutics.
The use of benign microorganisms offers a promising new approach to treating infection from pathogens like Salmonellaand indeed, L. reuteri has been shown to help protect against gastrointestinal infection and reduce diarrhea in children.
Safeguarding cells
The origin of L. reuteri’s protective role still remains unclear, and the present study investigated whether reuterin, a metabolite produced by L. reuteri during the process of reducing glycerol in the gut, could be one of the keys to protection. While it has been speculated that reuterin acts by regulating immune responses or competing with Salmonella for key binding sites, the current study represents the first in vitro examination of host-pathogen interactions using human intestinal epithelium in the presence of reuterin-producing L. reuteri.
Many scientists now regard human bodies as “supra-organisms”, collections of communities made up of human and microbial cells coexisting in a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Scientists working on a huge project that has mapped all the different microbes that live in and on a healthy human body have made a number of remarkable discoveries, including the fact that harmful bacteria can live in healthy bodies and co-exist with their host and other microbes without causing disease.
This week sees the publication of several papers from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), including two in Nature and two inPLoS ONE.
The Microbiome
The microbiome is the sum of all the microbes that colonize the body: it comprises trillions of microorganisms that outnumber human cells by 10 to 1. The microbes inhabit every nook and cranny of the body, and most of the time the relationship is a friendly one, because they help digest food, strengthen the immune system and fight off dangerous pathogens.
Colorado University (CU)-Boulder Associate Professor Rob Knight of the BioFrontiers Institute is co-author on the two Nature papers. He told the press that the microbiome may only make up 1 to 3% of human body mass, but it plays a key role in human health.
One of the fascinating features of the microbiome is that different body sites have different communites of microorganisms that are as different from each other as the differences between microbial communities in oceans and deserts.
Knight said:
“By better understanding this microbial variation we can begin searching for genetic biomarkers for disease.”
Another of the curious features the HMP has discovered is that even healthy people carry low levels of harmful bacteria, but as long as the body remains healthy, they don’t cause disease, they just coexist alongside beneficial microbes. …
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The HMP researchers established that more than 10,000 microbial species inhabit the human “ecosystem”. Knight said they believe they have now found between 81 and 99% of all genera of microorganisms in healthy adult Americans.
One of the key findings was the stark differences in microbial communities across the human body. For instance, the microbial communities that live on the teeth are different from those in saliva. …
…Another interesting discovery is that of the genes that influence human metabolism, most of them are in the microbiome and not in the human genome…
…gut bacteria do more than break down food and its constituents like proteins, fats and carbohydrates, they also produce beneficial compounds like vitamins and anti-inflammatories.
Microorganisms in the human gastrointestinal tract form an intricate, living fabric made up of some 500 to 1000 distinct bacterial species, (in addition to other microbes). Recently, researchers have begun to untangle the subtle role these diverse life forms play in maintaining health and regulating weight….
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Research conducted by the authors and others has demonstrated that hydrogen-consuming methanogens appear in greater abundance in obese as opposed to normal weight individuals. Further, the Firmicutes — a form of acetogen — also seem to be linked with obesity. Following fermentation, SCFAs persist in the colon. Greater concentration of SCFAs, especially propionate, were observed in fecal samples from obese as opposed to normal weight children. (SCFAs also behave as signaling molecules, triggering the expression of leptin, which acts as an appetite suppressor.)
While it now seems clear that certain microbial populations help the body process otherwise indigestible carbohydrates and proteins, leading to greater energy extraction and associated weight gain, experimental results have shown some inconsistency. For example, while a number of studies have indicated a greater prevalence of Bacteroidetes in lean individuals and have linked the prevalence of Firmicutes with obesity, the authors stress that many questions remain.
Alterations in gut microbiota are also of crucial concern for the one billion people worldwide who suffer from undernutrition. Illnesses resulting from undernutrition contribute to over half of the global fatalities in children under age 5. Those who do survive undernutrition often experience a range of serious, long-term mental and physical effects. The role of gut microbial diversity among the undernourished has yet to receive the kind of concentrated research effort applied to obesity — a disease which has reached epidemic proportions in the developed world.
Exploiting microbes affecting energy extraction may prove a useful tool for non-surgically addressing obesity as well as treating undernutrition, though more research is needed for a full understanding of regulatory mechanisms governing the delicate interplay between intestinal microbes and their human hosts….
New research published online in the FASEB Journal suggests that the types and levels of bacteria in the intestines may be used to predict a person’s likelihood of having a heart attack, and that manipulating these organisms may help reduce heart attack risk. This discovery may lead to new diagnostic tests and therapies that physicians use to prevent and treat heart attacks. In addition, this research suggests that probiotics may be able to protect the heart in patients undergoing heart surgery and angioplasty….
This blog presents a sampling of health and medical news and resources for all. Selected articles and resources will hopefully be of general interest but will also encourage further reading through posted references and other links. Currently I am focusing on public health, basic and applied research and very broadly on disease and healthy lifestyle topics.
Several times a month I will post items on international and global health issues. My Peace Corps Liberia experience (1980-81) has formed me as a global citizen in many ways and has challenged me to think of health and other topics in a more holistic manner.
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