“Is the fountain of youth in the gut microbiome?” This provocative question popped up a few months back, not in a dodgy online ad promoting probiotics, but as the headline of a March 2019 perspective article in the Journal of Physiology. Its inspiration: a new study that found when aged mice were given a broad-spectrum antibiotic to suppress their microbiomes, their arterial function bounced back to that of much younger animals. These results along with similar findings from other groups, the authors of the perspective article wrote, indicate that the gut microbiome is a promising therapeutic target for reducing the risk of age-related cardiovascular disease in humans.
In light of what’s now known about the effects of gut bacterial metabolites on the cardiovascular system, the results weren’t surprising, says Vienna Brunt, a physiology researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and the first author on the mouse study. In human ...
