The Gut Microbiome Becomes More Uniquely Dysfunctional with Age from Individual to Individual

The gut microbiome changes with age, and these changes are implicated in the progression of aging, such as via loss of beneficial metabolites produced by microbial species, or by chronic inflammation generated by harmful microbes when present in greater numbers. Researchers here add more data to what is known of the way in which the gut microbiome changes over the years, showing that the diversity of the microbiome increases across a population with increasing age. Resetting the gut microbiome to a more youthful configuration has been shown to be possible in animal studies via fecal microbiota transplantation from young individuals to old individuals. Given that fecal microbiota transplantation is already developed for use in human medicine, repurposing it for the treatment of old individuals should be an area of focus for the scientific and medical communities. Researchers analyzed gut microbiome, phenotypic, and clinical data from over 9,000 people - between the ages of 18 and 101 years old - across three independent cohorts. The team focused, in particular, on longitudinal data from a cohort of over 900 community-dwelling older individuals (78-98 years old), allowing them to track health and survival outcomes. The data showed that gut microbiomes became increasingly unique (i.e. increasingly divergent from others) as individuals aged, starting in mid-to-late adulthood, which corresponded with a steady decline in the abundance of core bacterial genera (e.g. Bactero...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs