{"id":2958,"date":"2025-01-08T05:42:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T05:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=2958"},"modified":"2025-01-08T05:42:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T05:42:00","slug":"you-me-and-our-microbiome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=2958","title":{"rendered":"You, Me, and Our Microbiome"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

You may have heard about the microbiome, that collection of microorganisms that fill the world around, and in, us. You may have had some digestive tract issues after a round of antibiotics wreaked havoc with your gut microbiome. You may have read about the rafts of research<\/a> that are making it clearer that our health is directly impacted by what is going on with our microbiome. You may even take probiotics to try to encourage the health of your microbiome.<\/p>\n

But you probably don\u2019t realize how interconnected our microbiomes are.<\/p>\n

Research published in Nature<\/em><\/a> by Beghini, et. al., mapped microbiomes of almost 2,000 individuals in 18 scattered Honduras villages. \u201cWe found substantial evidence of microbiome sharing happening among people who are not family and who don\u2019t live together, even after accounting for other factors like diet, water sources, and medications,\u201d said<\/a> co-lead author Francesco Beghini, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Human Nature Lab. \u201cIn fact, microbiome sharing was the strongest predictor of people\u2019s social relationships in the villages we studied, beyond characteristics like wealth, religion, or education.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of how different social niches form at a place like Yale,\u201d said co-lead author Jackson Pullman. \u201cYou have friend groups centered on things like theater, or crew, or being physics majors. Our study indicates that the people composing these groups may be connected in ways we never previously thought, even through their microbiomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s so fascinating is that we\u2019re so interconnected,\u201d said<\/a> Mr. Pullman. \u201cThose connections go beyond the social level to the microbial level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Study senior author Nicholas Christakis, who directs the Human Nature Lab, explained that the research \u201creflects the ongoing pursuit of an idea we articulated in 2007, namely, that phenomena like obesity might spread not only by social contagion, but also by biological contagion, perhaps via the ordinary bacteria that inhabit human guts.\u201d Other conditions, such as hypertension or depression<\/a>, may also be spread by social transmission of the microbiome.<\/p>\n

Professor Christakis thinks the findings are of broad importance, telling Science Alert<\/em><\/a>: \u201cWe believe our findings are of generic relevance, not bound to the specific location we did this work, shedding light on how human social interactions shape the nature and impact of the microbes in our bodies.\u201d But, he added: \u201cThe sharing of microbes per se is neither good nor bad, but the sharing of particular microbes in particular circumstances can indeed be good or bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

This research reminded me of 2015 research<\/a> by Meadow, et. al., that suggested our microbiome doesn\u2019t just exist in our gut, inside other parts our body, and on our skin, but that, in fact, we\u2019re surrounded by a \u201cpersonal microbial cloud.\u201d Remember the Peanuts character Pigpen<\/a>, who walked around in his personal dirt cloud? Well, that\u2019s each of us, only instead of dirt we\u2019re surrounded by our microbial cloud\u2013and those clouds are easily discernable from each other.<\/p>\n

Dr. Meadow told BBC<\/em> at the time<\/a>: \u201cWe expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those researchers predicted:<\/p>\n

While indoors, we are constantly interacting with microbes other people have left behind on the chairs in which we sit, in dust we perturb, and on every surface we touch. These human-microbial interactions are in addition to the microbes our pets leave in our houses, those that blow off of tree leaves and soils, those in the food we eat and the water we drink. It is becoming increasingly clear that we have evolved with these complex microbial interactions, and that we may depend on them for our well-being (Rook, 2013<\/a>). It is now apparent, given the results presented here, that the microbes we encounter include those actively emitted by other humans, including our families, coworkers, and perfect strangers.<\/p>\n

Dr. Beghini and colleagues would agree, and further suggest that it\u2019s not only indoors where we\u2019re sharing microbes.<\/p>\n

I would be remiss if I didn\u2019t point out new research<\/a> which found that our brains, far from being sterile, are host to a diverse microbiome and that impacts to it may lead to Alzheimer\u2019s and other forms of dementia.<\/p>\n

Could we catch Alzheimer\u2019s from someone else\u2019s personal microbiome cloud? It\u2019s possible. Could we prevent or even cure it by careful curation of the brain (or gut) microbiome? Again, possible.<\/p>\n

The truth is that, despite decades of understanding that we have a microbiome, we still have a very limited understanding of what a healthy microbiome is, what causes it to not be healthy, what problems arise for us when it isn\u2019t healthy, or what we can do to bring it (and us) to more optimal health. We\u2019re still struggling to understand where besides our gut it plays a crucial role.<\/p>\n

We now know that we can \u201cshare\u201d parts of our microbiome with those around us, but not quite what the mechanisms for that are\u2013e.g., touch, sharing objects, or having our personal clouds intersect.<\/p>\n

We feel like we are where scientists were two hundred years ago in the early stages of the germ theory of disease. They knew germs impacted health, they even could connect some specific germs with specific diseases, they even had rudimentary interventions based on it, but much remained to be discovered. That led to vaccines, antibiotics, and other pharmaceuticals, all of which gave us \u201cmodern medicine,\u201d but failed to anticipate the importance of the microbiome on our health.<\/p>\n

Similarly, we\u2019re justifiably proud of the progress we\u2019ve made in terms of understanding our genetic structure and its impacts on our health, but fall far short of recognizing the vastly larger genetic footprint of the microbiome with which we co-exist.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I called for \u201cquantum theory of health<\/a>\u201d\u2013not literally, but incorporating and surpassing \u201cmodern medicine\u201d in the way that quantum physics upended classical physics. That kind of revolution would recognize that there is no health for us without our microbiome, and that \u201cour microbiome\u201d includes some portion of the microbiomes of those around us. \u00a0We talk about \u201cpersonalized medicine,\u201d but a quantum breakthrough for health would be treating each person as the symbiosis with our unique microbiome.<\/p>\n

We won\u2019t get to 22nd century medicine until we can assess the microbiome in which we exist and offer interventions to optimize it. I just hope we don\u2019t have to wait until the 22nd century to achieve that.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD You may have heard about the microbiome, that collection of microorganisms that fill the world around, and in, us. You may have had some digestive tract issues after a round of antibiotics wreaked havoc with your gut microbiome. You may have read about the rafts of research that are making it clearer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}