Does the Gut Microbiome Contribute to Frailty via Oxidative Stress?

The challenge in understanding degenerative aging is at this point less a matter of identifying mechanisms, and more a matter of establishing which of the many mechanisms involved in every specific aspect of aging are actually important. Cellular biochemistry is a complex interconnected web, and it is very hard to make changes to just one mechanism in isolation, so as to establish exactly its contribution. Now that biotechnology has advanced to the point at which near every biological mechanism is a viable target for intervention, it matters whether or not the research and development communities focus on the right targets, those that can produce meaningful benefits to patients. Correlations are observed between the state of the gut microbiome and late life health, and the gut microbiome changes with age in ways thought to provoke inflammation and reduce the generation of beneficial metabolites. In today's open access paper, researchers propose that generation of excessive oxidative molecules via activities of the gut microbiome is an important factor in the onset and progression of age-related frailty. It is almost certainly the case that the mechanisms described in the paper exist, but it is very hard to say how important they are in humans versus other layered and interacting issues in aging, such as chronic inflammation, or loss of stem cell function in muscle tissue, or immunosenescence. One way forward would be to perform fecal microbiota transplants in ol...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs