A mouse and human-cell study links a microRNA called miR-29a to gut bacterial bile-acid processing and colitis severity. Mice lacking it developed worse colitis, converted less of a protective bile acid, and their gut cells lost some of that bile acid's anti-inflammatory power - a plausible mechanism, not yet confirmed in humans.
Reprocessing four public Alzheimer's gut-microbiome datasets through one pipeline found that most previously reported bacterial signatures don't hold up across independent cohorts. Only one genus, Lachnospira, consistently tracked with Alzheimer's status in all four studies - a preliminary, correlational finding from a single unreviewed preprint.
A new mouse study compares raw and ripened pu-erh tea polysaccharides, finding both fight diet-induced obesity, but through different gut bacteria, confirmed when researchers transplanted those gut microbes into other obese mice.
In a secondary analysis of a diet trial for multiple sclerosis, gut bacteria's propionate making potential rose most under a ketogenic diet, and within that group, bigger shifts tracked with smaller brain lesion growth. The trial's main result found no diet difference, and the authors call this exploratory.
A Molecular Psychiatry analysis of the ALSPAC UK birth cohort finds that polygenic risk scores for ADHD, autism, and depression predict different peer, school/employment, and suicidality outcomes depending on whether you look in childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood. No gut-microbiome findings are involved.
A national Chinese medical committee has issued a formal clinical guideline covering probiotics, prebiotics, synbiotics, postbiotics and fecal microbiota transplant for patients with metabolic associated fatty liver disease, including detailed FMT donor screening rules.
A Karolinska Institutet PhD thesis combining five studies finds that specific gut bacteria track with HIV-1 reservoir size and vaccine response in people on long-term antiretroviral therapy, though the associations are observational, not causal.
A systematic review of 12 randomized trials found multistrain probiotics roughly halved the odds of chemotherapy-related diarrhea in colorectal cancer patients, though the evidence base is still small and heterogeneous.
A five-year study of hospitalized cancer patients found that eating more sweets while on antibiotics tracked with steeper gut bacterial diversity loss and overgrowth of a harmful bacterium, a pattern mouse experiments helped confirm.
Scientists benchmarked 10 popular gut-microbiome health scores against disease outcomes in over 12,000 people, then tested them in 10 outside cohorts. The most common score, Shannon diversity, didn't survive the trip.
