Producing Alzheimer ' s Symptoms in Rats via a Transplanted Gut Microbiome

The gut microbiome changes with age, the relative population sizes of the many distinct microbial species altering to provoke chronic inflammation and potentially other, more complex issues driven by changes in the production of beneficial and harmful metabolites. With the advent of ways to cheaply assess the contents of the gut microbiome, researchers are finding that a number of age-related conditions appear characterized by dysbiosis, growth in the population of specific harmful microbial species. One of those conditions is Alzheimer's disease, which has a puzzling incidence that doesn't track well with the well established lifestyle risk factors for inflammatory disease. If it is instead primarily driven by specific alterations to the gut microbiome, that might go some way towards explaining why only some people progress from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. The study reported in today's research materials is intended to extend existing correlational data in humans to demonstrate whether or not an Alzheimer's-like gut microbiome can produce pathology when introduced into animal models, rats in this case. As such, the usual caveats to apply, in that rodents do not normally develop anything resembling Alzheimer's disease. Nonetheless, it is intriguing to see that Alzheimer's patient microbiomes cause cognitive issues in rats when compared to the effects of a non-Alzheimer's aged human microbiome. The observed effects are likely a matter of a greater ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs