Month: July 2020

I would only take antibiotics if prescribed them, with no alternative therapies available. The main reasoning behind this is the boom in studies on our microbial communities and the influence they have on our health. As I was going through school and taking science classes, the idea that antibiotics have been abused and could actually be harming our health as well as creating stronger, more resilient bacteria was emerging. This has given me an overall view of antibiotics as an outdated treatment, which should only be used as a last resort. Luckily, this thinking has prevailed and I was only prescribed antibiotics as single time, with strict instructions on when to stop taking them.

Overall, antibiotics are a vital treatment that has advanced medicine greatly, but they need to be taken with caution and special care behind them. Antibiotic abuse is a real issue and we must tread carefully while we understand so little about our microbiome.

Pretty much everything you do could alter your microbial community, which is kind of scary as your microbiome has been shown to influence everything from obesity to mental health. For this reason, especially since beginning this class, I have made several conscious lifestyle changes that influence my microbiome. Firstly, I have begun to consume more probiotics. For me this means yogurt only, as I attempted to drink kombucha and was repulsed by the taste. The goal of probiotics is to out-compete bad bacteria by colonizing your gut. I would also consume prebiotic and synbiotic products, though I have not seen any product labeled as such.

Unintentionally, there is my normal diet, which may be providing less than ideal fuel for my microbes. Different microbes use different sources of energy, and my microbes mainly get processed junk. For the most part, they would probably be happier eating healthier foods, but for the moment they must suffer.

Martin H. Floch, MD, in an editorial titled “Fecal Bacteriotherapy, Fecal Transplant, and the Microbiome” (2010) advocates that fecal transplantation therapy has seen sufficient medical evidence, and has been around for long enough to be a commonly accepted medical therapy despite some remaining skeptics. Floch supports this statement using three previously published studies that reveal significant benefits as a result of fecal transplantation. The purpose of this editorial is to advocate for FTT as a therapy in order to increase the prevalence of it’s use in medical practice. Floch’s intended audience is healthcare professionals, who he establishes a scholarly relationship with by displaying primary research as evidence.

Possible Microbiome Alterations:

i. Diet- Diet can alter the gut microbiome because there could be microbes on or in the food that you are potentially introducing to your already established environment, but also because the food you eat is also the food your microbes are going to eat. Reasonably then, we can assume if you eat a lot of a particular nutrient but then switch your diet to one where that nutrient is now scarce, your microbes will react and dysbiosis could occur. A change in diet could be positive, if introducing probiotics or negative, if diet somehow alters the Firmicutes to Bacteriodetes ratio, increasing the odds of GI tract pathologies.

ii. Antibiotics- Taking antibiotics will alter your gut microbiome, likely negatively. The function of antibiotics is to get rid of microbes so the diversity of microbes in your gut will probably be decreased. Lower diversity has been shown overall to lead to negative effects, which makes sense as destroying helpful gut bacteria will obviously not be good.

iii. Stress- Stress is known to have many physical manifestations if allowed to become chronic. An increase in stress would likely be harmful to your microbiome, as the sustained release of cortisol can alter metabolism which could also then lead to stress for your microbes.

iv. Environment- Changing environment could lead to a change in the microbial community due to different conditions spawning different microbes. The change in your microbiome likely correlates with how dramatic the change in environment is. For example, IBS incidence is higher in North America and very low in Africa with IBS etiology though to be linked to gut microbiome. Another example, Helicobacter pylori is found in much lower numbers in Australia than Africa. This indicates that environment has some effect on gut microbiome.

Source links:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0016648080901914

Human papillomavirus (HPV) has been shown to be the etiological agent of cervical cancer in women. Harald zur Hausen was initially able to demonstrate that HPV16 and HPV18 could be found in cervical cancer cells via Southern blot analysis. Subsequently, vaccines for HPVs 16 and 18 were developed and eventually released for use. There were also found to be several strains of HPV which could possibly considered carcinogens divided into two groups: the high-risk HPVs and other strains of HPV which likely exhibit activity as a carcinogen, though with the rigorous criteria required to make that link they are less supported. As a result, I would recommend development of treatment for HPVs 31 and 45. These are the two strains of high-risk HPV other than 16 and 18, which as mentioned already have available vaccines. Developing treatment for two strains would be greatly more manageable than tackling all strains associated with cancer and HPVs 16, 18, 31 and 45 account for 80% of cervical cancers, so it would be beneficial to expand treatment to the latter two strains. Treatments may be administered any time after the immune system matures, but preferably at an earlier age. Although HPV is accepted as necessary for cervical cancers to occur, they are not sufficient to cause cancer on their own. Observations indicate that accumulated genetic and epigenetic factors all play into cancer development and as a result, cancer will not develop immediately but rather several years down the line. This results in a slightly expanded time window with which treatment can be given.