“Is the fountain of youth in the gut microbiome?” This provocative question popped up a few months back, not in a dodgy online ad promoting probiotics, but as the headline of a March 2019 perspective article in the Journal of Physiology. Its inspiration: a new study that found when aged mice were given a broad-spectrum antibiotic to suppress their microbiomes, their arterial function bounced back to that of much younger animals.
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[S]ome teams are investigating other ways to exploit the crosstalk between the gut and the cardiovascular system to develop new therapeutics.
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Recently, [microbiologist Fredrik] Bäckhed, University of Wisconsin-Madison bacteriologist Federico Rey, and other colleagues found an apparently protective role for some species. Atherosclerosis-prone mice colonized by the butyrate-producing Roseburia intestinalis, for example, had fewer aortic lesions than mice lacking the bacterium, the team reported last year.
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Such findings suggest that probiotics could be developed to deliver protective species to people who lack them, Rey says. But, he cautions, “it’s not going to be a magic solution where you take this pill with this organism and you’re going to be healthy.”
Read full, original post: The Gut Microbiome Can Be a Boon or a Bane for Cardiovascular Health
