Intestinal Inflammation Increases with Age, and is Greater Still in Patients with Alzheimer ' s Disease

16s rRNA sequencing allows the microbial populations resident in the gut to be catalogued in detail: which species are present, and relative numbers by species. In the years since this assay became cheap, reliable, and readily available, researchers have built increasingly large human gut microbiome databases from samples obtained over the course of epidemiological studies. The research community has found that the gut microbiome exhibits characteristic differences in older people, marked by a growth in populations of inflammatory microbes and a loss of those species that produce beneficial metabolites. Further, some age-related conditions appear to be strongly correlated with an altered gut microbiome, particularly with the presence of increased numbers of inflammatory microbes. Alzheimer's disease is one of the conditions for which a growing body of evidence indicates that an altered gut microbiome plays a role in the onset and progression of pathology. The most likely mechanism by which the gut microbiome can contribute to disease is via provoking an increase level of chronic inflammatory signaling. Unresolved, continual inflammation is a characteristic of aging. It is disruptive of cell and tissue function, and contributes to many different age-related conditions. This doesn't rule out other possibilities, as biology is complex, and the gut microbiome can generate harmful metabolites as well as beneficial ones, but as today's open access paper indicates, inflammati...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs