Towards a Biomarker of Aging Based on the Gut Microbiome

A low-cost, low-effort way to accurately assess biological age, meaning the burden of molecular damage and the countless harmful cellular reactions to that damage, would greatly speed development of rejuvenation therapies. Ideally researchers would be able to apply a therapy and then within a month obtain a measure of how greatly it affects aging. At present the only reliable way to fully assess means of slowing or reversing aging is to run life span studies, which are slow and expensive in mice, and simply not feasible in humans. Thus a fair amount of effort is presently devoted to the development of biomarkers and combinations of biomarkers that might one day serve this purpose. In this preprint paper, researchers outline their work on the use of the gut microbiome as a basis for a biomarker of aging. It is known that characteristic changes occur in the microbiome with age, many of them detrimental and associated with the development of age-related disease, but there is a high degree of variability between individuals and study populations. Thus these results will certainly need a much broader replication as a part of any further development. Although infant microbiome succession is well studied and can be used to assess the risks of various health conditions, its transition to adult microbiome is less understood. More so, composition variability attributed to geographic location, medical history, diet, and other factors make it hard to analyze adult microbi...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs