Gut bacteria can show your true age

The intestines of absolutely any person in the world canto call it a real home for a huge number of microorganisms that are actively involved in ensuring the normal functioning of the human body. So, part of the bacteria helps us with digestion, while the other part helps the immune system to function and protects us from the invasion of some pathogenic bacteria. Scientists studying intestinal bacteria have come to the conclusion that the microbiome is a kind of biological clock that can predict the age of most people.

Bacteria that live in the intestines of a person can tell about his age

Intestinal bacteria can tell about the age of their "host"

In order to find out how exactly it is changingmicrobiome of the human intestine over time, the American company InSilico Medicine studied about 3600 samples of intestinal bacteria obtained from 1165 subjects living around the world.

For an unusual experiment, the teamfrom InSilico Medicine used a special deep learning algorithm, which was specially modeled according to the algorithm similar to the operation of brain neurons. The result was able to exceed all expectations: a unique program was able to guess the age of people with an error of approximately 4 years. In addition, it turned out that out of 95 types of bacteria that live in the human intestines, 39 types of microorganisms were the most important in predicting the estimated age of the subject.

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The idea that you can with a large sharethe probability of correctly predicting someone’s age, based on the data of the intestinal microbiome, can somewhat confuse people who are far from scientific knowledge. However, such information can be of great interest to scientists studying aging processes.

A huge number of different microorganisms are found in the intestines of any living creature. One of these is the digestive Eubacterium hallii.

The experiment was able to show that some microbescapture large areas of the body as a person ages. So, Eubacterium hallii, which is considered an important participant in the metabolism in the intestine, becomes at the same time almost the most common. At the same time, with age, the number of Bacteroides vulgatus bacteria, which often cause inflammation in the human digestive tract and are directly associated with ulcerative colitis, is significantly reduced. Compliance with diet, sleep and physical activity, most likely, only contributes to such changes.

The authors of the study argue that findingSimilar “hours of aging” of a person’s microbiome can be used to check how quickly or slowly a person’s intestines are aging. In addition, the presence of certain bacteria in the intestines of the body can be greatly influenced by the use of alcoholic beverages, drugs, food additives, or even a diet. Absolutely all of these factors can affect the duration of our lives. If so, then scientists hope that the results of the study can be used to identify some dangerous diseases, among which is Alzheimer's syndrome.

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However, the main problem is so unusualtheory of aging is the fact that despite its universal applicability in determining the age of a person, there are huge differences in which bacteria are present in the intestines of people living in different parts of the world. As mentioned above, diet, the presence of certain diseases, and, of course, age, can affect the number of bacteria.

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It is not known whether changes in the microbiome canhuman influence on faster aging of people or similar changes are simply a side effect of aging. Be that as it may, scientists still have something to think about.