Could Research Into the Microbiome Help Cure Disease?

 

Microbiome Research Will Change Our Approach

The research surrounding the microbiome is absolutely fascinating stuff. Could it help us one day cure or predict disease? Could it help us better treat celiac disease, Lyme Disease, cancer, even diabetes? It will most certainly change the way we approach our health, food, and environment.

Microbiomes are the communities of microorganisms that live on or in people, plants, soil, oceans, lakes, rocks, and the atmosphere. Recent discoveries have generated a new view of the biological world, one that recognizes that plants and animals are actually meta-organisms containing one or many microbial species. Inanimate surfaces, from rocks to keyboards, are likewise swarming with microbial life.

~National Microbiome Initiative

We first discussed the microbiome on this blog with Dr. Alessio Fasano, MD, Chief of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is the Director of the Center for Celiac Research. His ground breaking research had expanded into the microbiome, including studies on the microbiome in the gut and how that protects us from disease; as well as the gut’s relationship to the brain.

A recent article from NPR.org takes us a little further into the laboratory. Scientists are actually using food like sourdough as the "lab rats" in their experiments. Rob Dunn, a biologist out of North Carolina University, is leading an international team on the Sourdough Project. These researchers are using sour dough bread starters from home cooks all over the world. It is a citizen-science initiative," according to the NPR article. This is the ultimate collaboration - different disciplines, labs, world-wide, and with scientists and normal folks like you and me. We all affect each other. Even down to the little bugs that live in, on and around us. Why not work together?

Why sourdough, you ask? It is a fermented food, which means that some of the good bacteria that we need to digest and live are a part of their recipe. Sourdough and kimchi only have a few strains of good bacteria, which make them easier to study. Cheese rinds are more complex and their microbiome is actually similar to the one on your skin. Scientists can continually apply what they have learned from a simpler system (like sourdough), to more and more complex microbial systems, like cheese rinds, our skin, our gut, and our soil. How cool is that?

In recent years, scientists have learned that microbiomes have an outsize influence on nearly every aspect of the world, including health, agriculture and the environment. Imbalances in our gut microbiomes, for example, have been linked to a laundry list of health issues, including obesity, colon cancer and autism. Last year, then-President Barack Obama launched the National Microbiome Initiative, a half-billion-dollar plan to study the microbiome.

~NPR.org, July 17, 2017, More than Bread: Sourdough As a Window Into the Microbiome
Reporter, Marcus Woo

LEARN MORE COOL STUFF ABOUT THIS:

More than Bread: Sourdough As a Window Into the Microbiome (NPR)

National Microbiome Initiative

The Sourdough Project

Berkley Lab Participates in National Microbiome Initiative

Dr. Fasano on New Gut & Autoimmune Research, Autism, & Clearing Up the Gluten Confusion with His New Book

Don't Quit.

Ronald Stram, MD on Lyme as a Public Heatlh Crisis, How Physicians Need to Adapt, and the Trouble with Testing

Dear Friends,

This is my current specialist who is treating me for complex Lyme, Dr. Ronald Stram. He is a compassionate, smart man who is urging all doctor's to become educated as "not just literate, but actively seeking physicians" - and to make it part of their diagnostic differential. In other words, when someone comes in with bizarre symptoms, don't just ignore it, or work with standard tests. Learn about how this infection behaves, how the 100+ (in some countries 300+) possible co-infections behave and how the symptoms present outside of the tests, AND use other blood work - such as how the immune system is functioning. There are specific indicators in the immune system that can be tested to see if it is suppressed - and how.

Favorite Quotes from Dr. Stram:

"40% of Lyme patients end up with long term health problems. Catching it earlier brings those numbers way, way down."

"Lyme Disease Tests are 50% accurate. What scientist would accept a test like that?"

"“The best practice of medicine involves continual feedback from patients, research, labs, and analysis resulting in appropriate action.”

“It can leave you feeling hopeless. That’s when you have your mother or your father or your sister or your brother saying, ‘C’mon, you can take this pill.’”

... or your wonderful friends or adopted family of loving, supportive co-horts.

With Delicious Wishes,

Elisabeth

Love Bite Diaries #6: Three More Steps to Being in the Pink

 June 24, 2016

What Makes You Strut?

There are 3 steps leading toward the IV room at the doctor's office, and I just sorta trotted up them. I shocked myself and exclaimed to one of my nurses, Wendy, with a few tears, "I just kinda ran up the steps!" We celebrated for a moment. Me in my flip flops, and she with a syringe in her hand. Quietly, but truly celebrated with that little spark of spontaneous joy. I love Wendy.

It is remarkable what an infection can do. Just a few weeks ago, I was having a great deal of trouble going up and especially down even one step, because my muscles were becoming shockingly and suddenly weak. I'd see a step, panic, and then strategize how I would make my way down. A flight of stairs took an odd amount of courage. I lived in a second floor apartment and it was literally 24 hours between my ability to walk down the steps without blinking, and then pausing in fear as if I were at the top of Everest. If someone were watching, I tried to walk down like a super model, but could see how dreadfully I failed by the looks on my friend's faces. I think I take so many pictures of shoes and my feet, because in May, I was beginning to wonder if I would be in a wheelchair by June. Lyme likes to attack ligaments and joints, and for me it is the ligaments in the hips and shoulder - this time on my left side, and more recently my left knee and elbow, as well. Then all of my muscles got weak. When this first started, it focused more on my right side, but at my sickest I would wake up with all of my limbs temporarily paralized for hours. The fatigue then, was stunning. Neverending. But at that time I was told that I would be lucky if I lived.

But I did live. In February, I as I started feeling like myself again, I had moments that I could skip around like a teenager. I love to move. Then the door froze shut behind me, I was without a coat, and my skippy little feet found a patch of ice outside and hit only one thing - my head. Concussion.

I was starting to work out again on my Total Gym after adjusting my IV treatment at my regular physician's office in Michigan. As the infection was killed off, I could build my muscle back up again, but I could tell there was something blocking my progress. In 2013 and 2014, I was having trouble getting out of the car without falling. My left leg just couldn't hold any weight on its own. I couldn't open doors with my left arm, or hold anything reliably in my left hand. It was simply too weak.

A couple of years before that, I was doing handstands in yoga class. After working my way out of a terrible relapse that happened shortly after I moved to Michigan, I got my stiff back into backbends again, and felt my power return. I would go from very athletic to feeling like aliens took over my body. Once, my muscles were spasming so severely that my Dad brought me to my medical masage therapist, and the therapist had to bring me home and carry me inside. This is scary stuff. Each relapse was brought on by extreme stress and the lack of my own knowlege as well as medical knowlege about Lyme Disease and its co-infections did nothing to stop it. I had never, until recently, heard the word, "co-infection."

Co-infections are one of 16 ways, according to Dr. Horowitz, that keep people with Lyme sick - chronic, they call it. I hate that word, "chronic." But so it has been.

Now, I wait to see which co-infections I actually have.

Each time I relapse, I put out a pair of beautiful high heeled shoes to keep me going toward a goal. I put them where I can pass by them every day. I keep them out to remind me that there is beauty in the world, and people to see, and streets to strut. I like homework, you see. I like something to concentrate on besides feeling like crap. "Hope" is too namby pamby. It feels like a cruel, unattainable joke with a bad, bad punchline. Homework, now that I get. A target, a goal. A bullseye.

Pink high heels.

Love Bite Diary #5: Walking and Talking Progress

The Love Bite Diary started as notes to friends. These are friends from all over the world, brought to my laptop through that sorcery called Facebook. Until I catch up, the entries of the diary will not match the dates of the posts. I hope to add the stories of some of the incredible people I am meeting. In the meantime, I hope you are glad to be on this exploration with me, and that it is helpful to each of you in some way.

~ Thank you, Elisabeth

DATE: JUNE 19, 2016

Still Facing the Stairs

Things are continuing to progress here - I am walking better, although the stairs still terrify me. My speech is almost back to normal, although my neurological issues continue - my brain is on a 2 or 3 second delay behind my intention, and driving is tough, as mild spacial issues come and go like how wide the exit ramps are, etc. So it is great that I am just down the street from the doctor's office and treatment center now.

But this also makes it continue to be difficult to communicate. Especially about detailed allergen research on any medication, especially oral meds. Oral medications use fillers that include wheat, dairy, corn and tapioca. Tapioca has been a very common gluten-free filler or starch. It flies through the air with the greatest of ease and lands anywhere in the factory - and on products that don't contain it in their ingredients. It took a dangerously building reaction to make me realize why I was throwing up, swelling up, and feeling little steel fingers grab my throat after eating foods that never bothered me before. Vitamin C is sometimes derived from tapioca, too. More on that later.

We Affect Each Other

When I first told my friend Sue what my secret life was like (when it was secret), she said,"Thank you for sharing this with me. This sucks! This must end. You are going to get fixed no matter what it costs." She wondered why I was hiding. She called me up and asked. She was hearing me slur my words as I tried to cover it up. She saw me grab onto handrails like they were life rafts as I gingerly went down stairs and had noticed that I was falling a lot. She could hear that I had given up.

Sometimes we just need someone to care enough to notice.

This relapse had actually started with my left arm a few years ago. It became useless. I was doing handstands and walking on my hands, and then found that I couldn't support my weight on my arm anymore. I went to different doctors. Some looked at my rotator cuff and prescribed physical therapy (which did nothing or made it worse), others just said, "huh."

Even the doctors who knew I had been diagnosed with Lyme.

I got back into treatment, and got back on my feet. Thought I was OK. But, there was an enormous amount of building and long-term stress in my life over those years, and my body just couldn't take it anymore. As soon as I stopped the treatment, my entire left side slowly became so weak I couldn't put weight on my left leg. Then my knees "disappeared."

As many experienced Lymies have said, "Lyme Disease loves stress."

If you are out there an experience similar bizarre things that come and go and make you feel suddenly older or hermit-like, I hope you have someone who reaches into your business and pulls you back out. If not, gather your britches and fight for yourself. You are not crazy. You are stronger than you think you are. We are ultimately in charge of ourselves, but, opening up to a trusted friend also opened the door to a new and necessary kind of support that I've never had before.

We need each other. We affect each other. So much. I learned that it is OK to be the weak one and need help. I hate that. I really, really hate that. I want to be the mother hen that gathers people in and helps them heal. But it is OK. To need help. It is OK, because it is the truth. Don't let anyone tell you that it isn't. Even if those people are those you love. Or "experts."

Thus goes this leap of faith. And an unknown road ahead.