On AI, the Human Microbiome, Aging, Stress and more
Photo by Joel Staveley
n a recent study, Oxford University researcher Katerina Johnson discussed the link between individual personality traits and gut microbiome composition. Comments in the report included:
“Personality shapes our world. It influences our health, our friendships, how we deal with stress, what jobs we succeed in and how we like to spend our time.
"The burgeoning field of the microbiome is revealing the many ways that our ‘environment within’ can affect our body’s physiology, including our digestion, immuity, metabolism, development and even our behavior ... The gut microbiome has a measurable impact on the brain, influencing stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms and social behavior.
"Discovering new and effective interventions for mental health conditions is of pressing concern … We lead stressful lives with fewer social interactions and less time spent with nature, our diets are typically deficient in fiber, we inhabit over sanitized environments and are dependent on antibiotic treatments. All these factors can influence the gut microbiome and so maybe affecting our behavior and psychological well-being in currently unknown ways."
Separately, comments from “AI Can Predict your Age Based on Your Microbiome” (IBM Research blog) included:
“The human microbiome consists of a community of trillions of micro-organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and live all over the body including on the skin, in the mouth and along the digestive tract. A balanced microbiome is important for an individual’s health and wellbeing, including proper functionality the digestive and immune systems.
“researchers from IBM and University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) recently investigated the robustness of the human microbiome as an indicator of age. The results revealed that the skin microbiome provides the most accurate prediction of age, on average to within a few years of the true age in healthy subjects, compared to oral and gut microbiomes.
“This work opens the opportunities for developing, with the help of AI, non-invasive microbiome-based diagnostics and also interventions to maintain a healthy “youthful” microbiome.
OUR TAKE
The efforts mentioned above, and many others, should broaden our understanding of the relationships between genes, the environment, microbes, and disease –– which should provide opportunities for more personalized approaches to patient care in the future.
As research on the human microbiome and genome accelerates, more relevant information on medical indicators will expand – generating large (terabytes and petabytes) data sets - and creating a need for better ways to collect and analyze the data (AI, machine learning, etc.)
As medical innovations expand our knowledge of the human body, health care solutions will range from the technical (and perhaps complex) to the holistic (better fitness, nutrition and sleep).