The human body has more microbial than human cells, but this rich
diversity of micro-helpers that has evolved along with us is
undergoing a rapid shift--one that may have very macro health
consequences

By Katherine Harmon

Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains
in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of
researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic
guests are really ancient allies.

Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule
beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us
healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some
researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one
organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates.

The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that
number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part
of our bodies goes missing?

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past
century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline,
displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's
larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one
of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—
which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are
not yet understood. "This is the next frontier and has real
significance for human health, public health and medicine," says Betsy
Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan
(U.M.) School of Public Health in Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the
world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually
missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to
have," Foxman says.

Mice have survived largely free from microbial populations in labs.
But out in the world, traditional microbes are an important line of
defense against external and possibly dangerous invaders. By occupying
and even protecting their historic niche, this small fauna can keep
out more foreign bacteria and viruses, in turn helping to maintain
their human host's health. "Someone who didn't have their microbes,
they'd be naked," says Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology and
chair of the Department of Medicine at New York University Langone
Medical Center in New York City.

Companies have embraced aspects of microbial research, spreading
antibacterials to kill broad swaths of microbes or promoting probiotic
foods to introduce other groups of bacteria into the body. These
extremes, however, can make scientists in the field squirm. "There is
just so much we don't know," Foxman says about manipulating these
dynamics. And changes can occur quickly, even when they are
unintentional.

Potent treatments
Many of the changes in the human microbiome that have surfaced in
recent decades are a result of well-intentioned—and primarily salutary—
developments in medical treatment and prevention. For example,
overprescription of antibiotics, real lifesavers ever since the mid–
20th century, has sparked the evolution of drug-resistant strains of
tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus. More subtle side effects of
antibiotics are just beginning to be discovered.

"When antibiotics were first introduced, they were miraculous drugs—
and they still are," Blaser says. "But it really wasn't fully
considered that antibiotics select for resistance." And an antibiotic
will not only impact the infection it is targeted for. "It will select
for resistance across the microbiome," he added.

Common side effects of antibiotic treatments, such as yeast
infections, are a prime example of these silent shifts. Even as it is
being taken for an infection in another part of the body altogether,
an antibiotic can kill the organisms that habitually keep yeast
populations in check, allowing an unintended outbreak to occur.

Whereas some of these changes are transient and possibly a worthwhile
trade-off for antibiotic treatment, others are more lasting and
deleterious. As Blaser notes, "the [antibiotic resistance] selection
can persist for years and possibly permanently." The vanishing gastric
Helicobacter pylori bacteria, for example, have been facing
eradication in the U.S. and other developed countries in large part
from antibiotic use. Although this bacteria's demise has been pegged
to some positive outcomes, such as a decrease in the incidence of
gastric cancer, shrinking its populations can also increase the risk
for various reflux diseases by upsetting the regulation of hormones
and pH levels.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-microbiome-change&page=2

Additionally, "H. pylori–positive individuals have lower risks of
childhood asthma, allergic rhinitis and skin allergies than those
without H. pylori," Blaser and Stanley Falkow, of the Department of
Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, wrote in
an essay published in November in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They also
posited that due to the bacteria's role in mediating the hormone
ghrelin, which helps regulate fat development and hunger, it might
also "be contributing to the current epidemics of early-life obesity,
type 2 diabetes and related metabolic syndromes."

This shift in such a prominent bacterial community is detectible
through various medical tests, but transitions in many other species
with positive impacts on human health may still be going unnoticed.
"If [H. pylori is] disappearing…might there be other things that are
disappearing?" Blaser asks. He worries that many other, less studied
species—and even certain metabolic pathways—might also be on their way
out due to antibiotic use and other lifestyle changes.

Blaser doesn't call for abandoning a whole class of effective drugs,
but he does advocate for a better understanding of the potential trade-
offs—even if we might not yet have all the answers. "I don't think
anyone was putting that trade-off on the plate," says Blaser, who
notes that both doctors and patients should reserve antibiotic use to
cases where they are necessary.

Precarious protection
For many illnesses, modern medicine and research has bypassed the
treatment phase by developing effective prevention—ranging from
vaccines to public health measures to antibacterial products. And the
very successes of these measures "shows that we are changing the
microbiota," Blaser notes.

The vaccine for pneumococcal disease has been, by most accounts, a
success story, reducing the number of pneumonia cases and infections.
But Streptococcus pneumoniae is, in fact, a frequent occupant of
healthy individuals, and keeping this element out of the human body
has opened space for different and potentially more harmful pathogens.
"The pneumococcal vaccine, which is extremely well intended, may be
having some untoward consequences," Blaser says. Staphylococcus
aureus, which causes staph infections (a growing number of which are
community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or
MRSA) and the traditional S. pneumoniae are "competitors, and that
loss of the former is leading to the expansion of the latter," Blaser
and Falkow wrote in their Nature Reviews Microbiology paper. Like
antibiotics, however, vaccines are still important, Blaser says, but
some of these long-term consequences should be examined in the future.

Like modern medical developments, improved sanitation and the
proliferation of cleansers have saved countless lives and made the
rest of us seemingly healthier, but microbiologists are also rooting
out the dark side to clean living.

Those who subscribe to the "hygiene hypothesis" assert that overall
cleanliness has resulted in the recent increase of ailments such as
allergies and other immune system abnormalities. Such a line of
thinking asserts that "if you're a good parent you should have your
children eat dirt," Blaser says. Indeed, a study published online
December 7 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine found that even
while in the womb, mice whose mothers were exposed to a common
barnyard microbe (Acinetobacter lwoffii F78) were less likely to
suffer from allergies and asthma.

An overexuberance for the hygiene hypothesis, however, may be leading
people astray, Blaser notes. "It's my hypothesis that the microbes
that are present in dirt are irrelevant to humans," he says. "What are
relevant are the microbes that we've had for hundreds of thousands of
years—[and] are disappearing."

Extreme hygiene, on the level of using antibacterial products, is an
asset in health care settings, such as hospitals, where risk of
infection is high, Blaser notes. But such measures are not likely
working to our long-term advantage elsewhere, where the "benefit is
minimal if any," he says. "We have to begin to realize that we may be
doing some harm—we may be losing some of the good guys and thus become
more susceptible to the bad guys."

On the other end of the spectrum, popular probiotic products, which
promise to introduce beneficial bacteria by way of fortified food,
such as yogurt, are just one of the ways the primitive understanding
of human microbiota has begun to permeate popular culture. But many
researchers think confidence in such an approach is premature.
"There's clearly something there," Foxman says, "but if you want to
push a system to be a healthy system, you have to know what a healthy
system is."

And that's something researchers are frantically trying to figure out.
Blaser says: "If we understood what we're losing, then we could
replace it." He imagines a future where vaccinations are not just for
viruses but for microbial populations, as well. Infants may one day be
screened for native microbiota and given immunizations to fill in
important missing niches.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-microbiome-change&page=3

Mapping the microscopic
Even though it is such an apparently integral and ancient aspect of
human health, scientists are still grasping for better ways to study
human microbiota—before it changes beyond historical recognition.
Borrowing models from outside of medicine has helped many in the field
gain a better understanding of this living world within us. "The
important concept is about extinctions," Blaser says. "It's ecology."

Deborah Goldberg, a plant ecologist by trade and professor in the
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at U.M., happened upon
the field by chance, but she has found her ecological perspective to
be quite "relevant in talking about pathogens," she says.
Microbiologists had already begun to apply rudimentary ecological
thinking about niches and disturbance to microbial work, she says. But
newer developments in the field of ecology—from invasion biology to
spatial dynamics and dispersal—have brought new insights, notes
Goldberg, who co-authored a 2007 paper with Foxman in
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Infectious Diseases about human
microbiota.

For many current research purposes, however, the ecological model can
be daunting. "As an overall approach, ecology is hard," Goldberg says.
"It's complex systems and highly dimensional."

These challenges have led many to think of human microbiota more as
biologists conceptualize organ systems, looking for inputs and outputs
and putting aside—for now—what happens in the so-called black box.
"It's conceptually easy to think of it as an organ system," Foxman
says. "But there are lots of reasons to go into the black box….
Ultimately, we really do need to understand the system."

The first step in understanding these systems is simply taking stock
of what archaea, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses are present in
healthy individuals. This massive micro undertaking has been ongoing
since 2007 through the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Human
Microbiome Project. So far it has turned up some surprisingly rich
data, including genetic sequencing for some 205 of the different
genera that live on healthy human skin.

Despite the flood of new data, Foxman laughs when asked if there is
any hope for a final report from the Human Microbiome Project any time
soon. "This is the very, very beginning," she says, comparing this
project with the NIH's Human Genome Project, which jump-started a
barrage of new genetic research. "There are basic, basic questions
that we don't know the answers to," she says, such as how different
microbiota are between random individuals or family members; how much
microbiota change over time; or how related the microbiota are to each
other on or inside a person's body.

Rapid advances in sequencing technology, however, have allowed
researchers to accelerate their work by leaps and bounds. "I can do
today what I couldn't do six months ago," Foxman says. "It's going to
be a wild ride [with] lots of surprises," she adds. "We will be
getting in that black box pretty quickly, but we may not like what we
find."

===============

Firicutes over represented in psoriasis?

Huh?

Why is that?

You don't know, but i do. LOL

PMID: 18648509

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18648509
PLoS One. 2008 Jul 23;3(7):e2719.

Substantial alterations of the cutaneous bacterial biota in psoriatic
lesions.
Gao Z, Tseng CH, Strober BE, Pei Z, Blaser MJ.

Department of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New
York, New York, United States of America.

For psoriasis, an idiopathic inflammatory disorder of the skin, the
microbial biota has not been defined using cultivation-independent
methods. We used broad-range 16S rDNA PCR for archaea and bacteria to
examine the microbiota of normal and psoriatic skin. From 6 patients,
19 cutaneous samples (13 from diseased skin and 6 from normal skin)
were obtained. Extracted DNA was subjected to the broad range PCR, and
1,925 cloned products were compared with 2,038 products previously
reported from healthy persons. Using 98% sequence identity as a
species boundary, 1,841 (95.6%) clones were similar to known bacterial
16S rDNA, representing 6 phyla, 86 genera, or 189 species-level
operational taxonomic unit (SLOTU); 84 (4.4%) clones with <98%
identity probably represented novel species. The most abundant and
diverse phylum populating the psoriatic lesions was Firmicutes
(46.2%), significantly (P<0.001) overrepresented, compared to the
samples from uninvolved skin of the patients (39.0%) and healthy
persons (24.4%). In contrast, Actinobacteria, the most prevalent and
diverse phylum in normal skin samples from both healthy persons
(47.6%) and the patients (47.8%), was significantly (P<0.01)
underrepresented in the psoriatic lesion samples (37.3%).
Representation of Propionibacterium species were lower in the
psoriatic lesions (2.9+/-5.5%) than from normal persons (21.1+/-18.2%;
P<0.001), whereas normal skin from the psoriatic patients showed
intermediate levels (12.3+/-21.6%). We conclude that psoriasis is
associated with substantial alteration in the composition and
representation of the cutaneous bacterial biota.

PMID: 18648509

Three quarters of the way down this page:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.skin-diseases.psoriasis/msg/7fac55a6dc4109e1?hl=en&&q=PMID%3A+18648509+

==============

randall... skin flora....OK, but gut flora comes first

zzznot

unread,

Dec 17, 2009, 12:19:44 PM12/17/09

>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-microbiome-change
>Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy
>Disappear?

What?

Why should human microbes disappear, as long as there
are plenty of people? This is a very confused article.

Helicobacter pylori is a good thing? Er, doubt it.
But if it is, then that means it's in plenty of people
causing no problem, so why should it disappear?

randall

unread,

Dec 17, 2009, 12:39:53 PM12/17/09

To use an analogy maybe their trying to say
bugs are like people.

While some don't seem to have a sense of purPose,
in a weird way they may. :)

Take me for instance.

My entire life purpose besides the really nice family
I am so blessed to be part of, seems to be
finding the right mix of gut critters and keeping them
viable (eating sweet whey every day) so as to walk around
in nearly CLEAR skin.

While other things come down the pike, I more or less
have a seemingly odd desire to help everyone with a
Th1 skew (autoimmune) and now with this understanding those with
a Th2 skew (cancer hiv/aids etc) to avoid excess inflammation.

And get healthier in the process of life with these bugs.

Since

There are thousands of genes in the inflammation game.

And if i can game lacti loving gut bugs to tame that beast
so much the better.

This canary in the cave will sing.

Check out this story that tugged at my heart strings
when i found your reply.

http://www.ayrshirepost.net/ayrshire-news/local-news-ayrshire/ayr-news/2009/12/18/ayrshire-sons-speaks-of-mum-s-suicide-attempts-102545-25403705/

Ayrshire sons speaks of mum's suicide attempts
Dec 18 2009 by Lisa Boyle, Ayrshire Post (main ed)

MY MUM tried to commit suicide last Christmas Eve.

It was after a stint of depression which started when my parents got
divorced.

She seemed to be doing really good. All my brothers are out the house
but we all kept in contact and she seemed to be doing good.

I was just about to head to Africa to do a mission trip but on
Christmas Eve my brother phoned to say he’d found my mum in the
kitchen and that I had to come home.

Immediately I felt panic and I felt physically sick.

Then I developed psoriasis with the stress of it all.

So last Christmas was spent in the hospital with my mum.

At that point she wasn’t talking much, it was just us sitting with her
trying to comfort her and giving her gifts that she wasn’t really
bothered about.

The warning signs were that she was less talkative. She’s a bit of an
extrovert but whenever we tried to talk to her about the family she
didn’t seem to bother.

Her relationship with my nieces and nephews changed. She loved the
kids but whenever they were around her she got quite aggressive and
didn’t seem to have time for them.

A year down the line, things are a lot better.

She spent three months in hospital. She was given medication and
completely shifted overnight.

Had she been successful it would have deeply impacted the family.

My mum, like a lot of mums, is the person who holds the family
together.

To anyone contemplating the same thing I would say there is always
hope.

A lot of people think they are doing their family a favour but they
are not. It’s something the family will always need to live with.
<sniP>

=============

What? The imPending xmas holidays so stressed the MOM that she was
dePressed enough
to end her LIFE? How long was that in coming?

Yikes.

It could be a simple LACK of vitamin D3 that diminished this chiPPer
MOM.

And her SON via the MOMs stress onsets with psoriasis?

The son's african mission to help folks should include the mom and a
daily
dosage of UVB's.

Mom and SON should both be poPPIng the D3.

And using some resveratrol from www.longevinex.com
And eating sweet whey to regrow those lactibacillus gut critters.

Find a purpose.

Certainly the SON has learned comPassion from his mother.

And while her job might not seem necessary, he still see's her
as the GLUE that holds the FAMILY intact.

Life is worth living to the fullest.

And if you have some love in you create more by sharing it.

randall...

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