Your gut microbiota has a direct connection to your heart function, which led scientists to recently discover a possible new method of evaluating cardiovascular health.
Researchers already knew, through previous studies, that the human gut microbiome — bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract — is associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of mortality worldwide.
In the study, they analyzed data from nearly 1,000 stool samples from people with and without CVD. About half the 1,000 stool samples were from people with CVD, and researchers were able to identify, through the gut bacteria, those with existing CVD and those without CVD. The model was able to identify different clusters of gut bacteria that could potentially help identify individuals with CVD.
"It is conceivable that one day, maybe without even assessing detailed cardiovascular function, clinicians could analyze the gut microbiome of patients' stool samples with an artificial machine learning method to screen patients for heart and vascular diseases,” said Bina Joe, Ph.D., the study director and a professor and chairwoman of the department of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Toledo in Ohio.
Source: Science Daily September 10, 2020