Are Microbiome Changes a Cause or Symptom of Type 1 Diabetes?

[Northerner]

Two years ago, I interviewed Alex Kostic, who was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard exploring the microbiome’s connection to type 1 diabetes. His work studying children in Finland and parts of neighboring Russia showed that the microbiomes of children with type 1 diabetes were drastically different from the microbiomes of those without the disease. Now Kostic is running his own lab at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, and investigating questions such as whether or not the changes in the microbiome are causing disease or are merely a symptom of it. He is also looking at the microbiota of the Joslin medalists—those who have lived with type 1 diabetes for more than fifty years. About 20-30 percent of those medalists still produce a trace amount of insulin, and Kostic is trying to understand whether that insulin production can be explained by differences in those medalists’ microbiomes.

https://asweetlife.org/are-microbiome-changes-a-cause-or-symptom-of-type-1-diabetes/

 

[trophywench]

All very interesting of course - for the future! LOL

 

[Northerner]

I think I'll send them some of my poo to study 🙂

 

[mikeyB]

It’s interesting, the biome. But I developed Ulcerative Colitis, destroying my biome, 6 months after I developed diabetes ( and found out I was T1 thereafter). Make of that what you will. Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

 

[mikeyB]

Actually, both developed at the time when Mrs B was still seriously ill after a brain haemorrhage. There’s your trigger, if ever there was one.