microbiome

Does a hospital stay set patients up for sepsis by disrupting the microbiome?

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From EurekAlert: Gut check: Does a hospital stay set patients up for sepsis by disrupting the microbiome?

Can a routine hospital stay upset the balance of microbes in our bodies so much that it sets some older people up for a life-threatening health crisis called sepsis? A new University of Michigan and VA study suggests this may be the case.

It shows that older adults are three times more likely to develop sepsis — a body-wide catastrophic response to infection — in the first three months after leaving a hospital than at any other time.

What’s more, the risk of sepsis in that short post-hospital time is 30 percent higher for people whose original hospital stay involved care for any type of infection — and 70 percent higher for those who had a gut infection called Clostridium difficile.

In fact, one in 10 C. diff survivors end up with sepsis within three months of their hospital stay, according to the new study published online in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. It’s the first analysis of its kind.

The researchers chose to look at the relationship between hospitalization and sepsis because of a growing understanding that antibiotics and other infection treatments disrupt the body’s microbiome — the natural community of bacteria and other organisms that is vital for healthy body function. In turn, C. difficile preys upon hospital patients who have a disrupted gut microbiome. [continue]

Has news about the importance of the microbiome been showing up everywhere in your world, too? Or is it just the stuff I read that is full of microbiome news?

Our microbes, ourselves

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From Brainpickings: Our Microbes, Ourselves: How the Trillions of Tiny Organisms Living Inside Us Are Redefining What It Means to Be Human.

Being alone may be the central anxiety of our time but, as it turns out, you are never really alone — at least in a biological sense: Every single cell of you — that is, every cell made of human DNA — is kept company by ten cells of microbes that call your body home. And because microbes are single-celled organisms that each carry their own DNA, the difference is even starker in genetic terms — you carry approximately twenty thousand human genes and two to twenty million microbial ones, which makes you 99% microbe. What’s more, although you and I are 99.99% identical in our human DNA, we are vastly different in our individual microbiomes — you have only one in ten of my microbes. Even more striking than the sheer number of these silent and invisible cohabitants is their power over what we consider our human experience — they influence everything from our energy level to how we handle illness to our moods to how tasty we are to mosquitoes. [continue]