Your gut microbiome changes throughout life. It may also be linked to how you age.
The gut microbiome is a large community of microorganisms living mainly in the intestine.
These microorganisms interact with your body every day. They help process components of food, produce metabolites and interact with the immune system and intestinal barrier.
These functions may be relevant to healthy ageing.
A large study of more than 9,000 people found that gut microbiomes became increasingly individual from mid-to-late adulthood.
The pattern was especially interesting after about age 80.
Healthier older people continued to develop more individual microbiome profiles. This pattern was much less apparent in people with poorer health.
The researchers also found links between microbiome patterns and microbial metabolites in the blood.
This suggests that healthy ageing may be associated not only with which microorganisms are present, but also with what they do.
But the relationship can work in both directions.
Your microbiome can be influenced by diet, medications, physical activity, environment and disease. Changes in health can therefore change the microbiome.
This makes cause and effect difficult to separate.
A microbiome pattern associated with healthy ageing may contribute to health. But it may also partly reflect a person’s existing health, lifestyle and medical history.
For this reason, scientists cannot yet define one microbiome pattern that will make a person age more healthily.
What is clear is that the gut microbiome and the body remain closely connected throughout life. Understanding this relationship may help us better understand why people follow different paths of ageing.
