How long your life is and how you age rests on factors that are well beyond your control. However, recent discoveries in the human gut microbiome suggest that it plays a vital role in aging and longevity.
The human gut microbiome is an indispensable component of the human body, however, its impotence in the aging process of humans has remained unclear. ISB researchers and collaborators have recently identified specific signatures in the human gut microbiome that are associated with healthy and unhealthy aging trajectories.
What is the Human Gut Microbiome?
According to the University of Washington, humans are comprised of mostly microbes with more than 100 trillion of them cohabitating our bodies. Microbes greatly outnumber the number of human cells by ten to one. The majority of these microbes live in the body's gut, especially in the large intestine.
The microbiome refers to the genetic material of all these microbes such as fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses that either lives on or inside the human body. The amount of genes in all microbes in a person's microbiome is 200 times more than the number of genes in the human genome and can weigh as much as five pounds.
Bacteria in the human microbiome are key in human development, nutrition absorption, and immunity. These microbes are not invaders but beneficial colonizers.
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Implications of the Human Gut Microbiome to Healthy Aging and Longevity
Researchers analyzed the human gut microbiome via phenotypic and clinical data gathered from more than 9,000 individuals between 18 to 101 years of age across three independent cohorts. The team focused primarily on longitudinal data from a pool of more than 900 community-dwelling older participants between the ages of 78-98 allowing the team to track health and survival outcomes ScienceDaily reports.
The data collated suggests that gut microbiomes were increasingly unique and divergent from other participants as the person aged, beginning in its mid-to-late adulthood that corresponds with a steady decline in the abundance of a person's core bacterial genera that tend to be equally shared across humans.
Interestingly, as the microbiomes became more unique to each participant in healthy aging, their metabolic functions carried out more shared common traits. The gut's uniqueness signature was more correlated with several microbially-derived metabolites in the blood plasma that, previously, have been shown to extend mice lifespan. Blood levels of another metabolite show evidence of strong association with the uniqueness of the gut microbiome.
In a study published in the journal Nature Metabolism, titled "Gut microbiome pattern reflects healthy ageing and predicts survival in humans" Dr. Tomasz Wilmanski, lead author and ISB Researcher says that the unique signature of the microbiomes can predict the patient's survival in the last decades of the individual's life. Wherein healthy individuals roughly 80 years old showed continued microbial drift heading to unique compositional state, but likewise drifts were less likely in less healthy individuals.
Researchers are positive that the groundbreaking revelation will have major clinical implications in modifying human gut microbiome health throughout an individual's life.
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