The life of bacteria living in our gut parallels our own lives, changing in response to our experiences, activities and diet, a study suggests.
Researchers hoping to better comprehend the role of gut bacteria inside the body monitored variations in the bacteria of two people over a year while the subjects used a smartphone app to track lifestyle variables such as diet, exercise, mood and sleep that could have an impact on microbes living in their digestive systems.
While the study showed there's a "default" microbiota -- the bacterial community living within our bodies individual to each person -- that remains unaffected by exercise, sleep or mood, the state of that microbiota was not completely unconnected to events in the outside world, the researchers found.
"Life events such as visiting another country or contracting a disease cause a significant shift in the make-up of the gut microbiota -- the community of bacteria living in the digestive system," the researchers reported in the journal Genome Biology.
For example, in response to a case of food poisoning in one study participant and a move abroad by the other, the "community of bacteria" in both made observable adjustments, they said.
"I was surprised by our results in several ways," said Duke University researcher Lawrence David. "First, I wasn't sure we would find correlations between fiber intake and gut bacterial dynamics on such short time scales. And I was amazed to see how profoundly a single food poisoning event impacted the gut bacteria."
In the participant suffering the episode of food poisoning, pre-existing species of gut bacteria showed a significant decline, and some minor effects of diet showed themselves within a single day, the researchers said.
Smartphone monitoring used in the study could some day be utilized in wider studies of the day-to-day interplay between humans and the bacteria they carry within, and how the individual composition of our microbiota affects our day-to-day health, they said.
Such monitoring could possibly help people predict, detect and ease flare-ups of certain chronic intestinal diseases such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, they said.
"This has given us a lot of new ideas for follow-up studies and analyses of gut microbial ecology as well as infectious diseases in humans," David said.
