Microbiome in cardiovascular disease
The gut microbiome is hugely important in many aspects of human well-being. It is a major window through which our environment affects our threshold for developing a wide array of diseases. This blog will focus on some of the cardiovascular effects of a distorted (dysbiotic) microbiome. -- a very recent article assessed the effects of the gut microbiome on cholesterol metabolism, specifically the microbiome's ability to convert cholesterol to coprostanol, a poorly absorbed sterol (https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1931-3128%2820%2930295-X ). The researchers found that there was a clade of highly prevalent, but previously uncharacterized, IsmA-encoding bacterial species. This research group had previously found that the IsmA enzyme participated in converting cholesterol to coprostanol and identified uncultured Eubacerium species with the ismA gene; this conversion of cholesterol to coprostanol in patients, in 3 studies with paired s...