Tag: key

Posted on

Microbiome may be the key

Microbiome may be the key

Fresh kale leaves in a colander Share on Pinterest
Wellness rewards from consuming dietary fibers may possibly rely on the sort of fiber, dosage, and one’s microbiome, a modern review observed. Jeff Wasserman/Stocksy
  • Superior fiber meal plans have lots of health positive aspects, like lowering the hazard of coronary heart assault and stroke.
  • Many distinct types of nutritional fiber can be eaten as portion of a assorted food plan or as dietary supplements.
  • Distinct fibers could have unique results on our intestine microbiome.
  • A new research suggests that applying targeted dietary fibers may perhaps profit wellbeing.

Fiber is an crucial part of our weight loss plans. If not identified as roughage, it is the indigestible portion of plant foods that can help lessen the danger of well being situations these kinds of as heart sickness and variety 2 diabetes.

There are two sorts of fiber, both of which are non-starch polysaccharides that folks can’t digest:

  • Insoluble fiber delivers bulk to the diet plan and moves squander by way of the overall body, maintaining the gut healthy and assisting avert constipation.
  • Soluble fiber forms a gel-like material that is damaged down by intestine germs. It can decreased cholesterol levels and assistance control blood sugar concentrations.

But not all dietary fibers are equivalent. A new analyze posted in Mobile Host & Microbe has located that wellbeing added benefits fluctuate involving individuals and may count on the form of fiber, the dose eaten, and the individual’s microbiome.

Scientists from Stanford Faculty of Medication examined how two purified soluble fibers — arabinoxylan (AX) and lengthy-chain inulin (LCI) — afflicted a team of 18 contributors.

AX is observed in total grains, these types of as rye, wheat, oats, and rice LCI is identified in onions, chicory root, garlic, and Jerusalem artichokes. Equally styles of fiber can also be taken as dietary health supplements.

The members in the study had an normal age of 56.9 years. Of the 8 guys and 10 women, 14 had obese or overweight, and 11 had been insulin delicate. The scientists separated them randomly into 2 teams for three crossover trials. One particular group commenced with AX, the other with LCI then switched more than. Both equally groups finished with a mixture of fibers consisting of AX, LCI, acacia gum, glucomannans, and resistant starch.

Each and every trial lasted 3 weeks. In the 1st week, the participants consumed 10g of fiber per day, climbing to 20g in the 2nd week and 30g in the 3rd. The participants then experienced a 6-8 week crack between the 3 trials.

“This is a Pretty tiny research of 18 participants who are ‘free-living’ — this means their food stuff is not currently being managed — so involving the foodstuff and the sample measurement, it’s very tricky to attract meaningful conclusions. Like virtually all fantastic investigate I study on the microbiome, this raises as a lot of thoughts as it answers.”

– Kate Cohen, M.S., R.D.N., of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medication at Providence Saint John’s Well being Middle in Santa Monica, CA, talking to Health-related News Right now.

The scientists collected plasma, serum, and stool samples from all contributors at the start out of the demo, then at the conclusion of each week. They also measured their heart fee and blood strain.

They calculated adjustments in lipids, which includes cholesterol, the genetic substance in the stool samples (to establish gut microbes), plasma proteins, metabolites, and cytokines. Cytokines are inflammatory markers indicating inflammation in the physique.

When using AX, most participants experienced a major drop in lower-density lipoprotein (LDL), or ‘bad’ cholesterol, and an enhance in bile acids. The authors suggest that the raise in bile acids could lead to the reduction in LDL. Nevertheless, some contributors noticed no improve in LDL stages.

For LCI, most, but not all, folks observed a little minimize in inflammatory markers and an boost in Bifidobacterium. This gut microbe is usually regarded as advantageous to gut health and fitness. Nonetheless, the optimum dose of LCI (30g for every day) reversed this outcome. At this dose, members saw increased inflammation and elevation in alanine aminotransferase, an enzyme involved with liver problems.

Blended fiber supplementation yielded less important variations.

The authors notice that responses were not consistent for all persons for either type of fiber, suggesting that each individual person’s microbiome may determine responses.

“Our success show that the physiological, microbial and molecular results of individual fibers vary substantially.”

– Dr. Michael Snyder, senior research creator, stated in a press release.

Kate Cohen was excited to see exactly where the authors would go following: “Uncovering how unique fibers interact with the microbiome is an crucial phase towards creating individualized diet a actuality. This investigation is also laying the groundwork for utilizing meals-as-drugs in a certainly prescriptive way. This analyze confirms when once again that the microbiome holds great probable for being familiar with human wellness.”

The present advised fiber ingestion is 14 grams for each individual 1,000 energy consumed, according to the American Academy of Nutrition.

Experts say it is greatest to get your fiber from meals resources in advance of employing health supplements.

Posted on

A key issue for COVID-19 vaccines

A key issue for COVID-19 vaccines

One of the greatest success stories of the pandemic has been the development of mRNA vaccines. However, 2 years into the pandemic, many people’s immune systems are no longer naive to the virus, which has led to questions about how vaccines could and should evolve in the future.

masked person pulling trollerShare on Pinterest
What is ‘immune imprinting,’ and what does it mean for the future of COVID-19 vaccines? Image credit: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

When AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna started to recruit participants for their first COVID-19 vaccine trials in the spring and summer of 2020, they had to find people who did not think they had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies took this measure for a number of reasons — for example, the world had little idea how much previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 might protect against future infections.

Without this information, it was difficult to evaluate how much of the protection discovered in the trial was due to the vaccine or to previous exposure to the virus. This presented some challenges.

In fact, in areas heavily impacted by the virus in the first wave, the requirement to recruit participants with no previous infection was met with some initial reactions of disbelief.

Community testing had not been in place for months in many places, some people would have had asymptomatic infections, and it is also likely people had COVID-19 before they understood it was circulating in their region.

And of course, no trial participants had, in the beginning, received any other form of COVID-19 vaccine as they did not yet exist.

Research has since shown that previous SARS-CoV-2 infection alongside vaccination offers the strongest protection against future infection, that mixing and matching vaccines works, and that immunity from COVID-19 wanes with time.

Our understanding of the virus has improved. We know how it spreads, how to protect against it, and how to treat the disease it causes. Yet, at the same time that this body of knowledge has grown, our actual bodies have changed in how they might respond to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

While in November 2019, very few people in the world had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, today, over 11 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, and about 500 million people are likely to have had COVID-19.

Of those individuals, some will have contracted the original Alpha variant of the virus, some Delta, some Omicron, and some may have had several infections with more than one variant.

Considering that, on top of that, many people will have been vaccinated with different types of vaccines and different combinations of vaccines, the ways in which our immune systems may have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 markers are myriad.

While many of us will be able to stage an immune response to SARS-CoV-2 that we would not have been able to 2 years or even 1 year ago, the individual response may vary considerably between people, depending on the nature of previous exposure.

This phenomenon is known as immune imprinting, Prof. Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London explained to Medical News Today in an interview:

“All those things push and pull your immune repertoire, your antibodies and things in different directions, and make you respond differently to the next vaccine that comes along […] So that’s what’s called immune imprinting.”

Along with colleagues at Imperial College London and St Mary’s University, London, United Kingdom, he carried out a detailed, longitudinal study of a cohort of 731 healthcare professionals.

Their individual immune responses were measured after vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine, and stratified according to who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and those who had not, and which strain they were likely to have had depending on when they contracted the virus.

The results appeared in the journal Science in December 2021, and they outline how the exact spike protein an individual is exposed to during infection or vaccination affects that individual’s ability to stage an immune response to other spike proteins.

Since then, research by other teams has confirmed their findings.

“Some people want to be very exotic and sort of biblical about it, call it ‘original antigenic sin,’ you know, the idea that […] your immune system is born with some sin on board already, and you can’t go change it back to a blank sheet. So that’s not the kind of academic nuance, that’s a real thing and a big thing,” Prof. Altmann said.

So how are the pharmaceutical companies factoring these different responses into their vaccine trials?

First of all, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), which held its first vaccine trials months after the other pharmaceutical companies, allowed people who had previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 into their trials, outlined in its results. Instead, they excluded people who had received other vaccinations.

Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are holding current vaccine trials with their existing vaccines. A spokesperson for Pfizer told MNT:

“In our ongoing studies of COVID-19 vaccines we include both vaccinated and previously unvaccinated participants. Additionally, in our landmark phase 3 study we had seropositive and seronegative participants. So to summarize, people who have previous vaccination/ infection are included in our current trials.”

AstraZeneca responded similarly, with Fiona Cookson, director of global media relations telling MNT: “We do take into account previous infection in our studies as part of the stratification process.”

The use of original vaccines based on the original variant was still valid, said Prof. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and medical director of the UCSF Center for AIDS research.

This was because attempts to develop variant-specific vaccines showed that it was not possible to develop them quickly enough to be of use in each wave.

She told MNT: “This study [in Science] shows that the well-described phenomenon of a breakthrough infection enhancing vaccine responses is less effective if the infection involves a variant of concern since the variant has a different (heterologous) spike protein — with mutations that distinguish it from the ancestral state — than that encoded by the vaccine.”

“Clinically, this likely means that there is no reason to develop variant-specific boosters since they may not be more effective against a variant in the future and that we can likely stick with the original booster — with the Wuhan-Hu-1 sequence — for now,” she added.

While the original vaccines are still effective, the finding also raises questions about whether mRNA vaccines, which were designed to make the body launch an immune response to the original spike protein, would have been better designed to help the body stage a response against a different, less frequently mutating part of the viral RNA.

Originally, researchers had hoped that designing mRNA vaccines to help our bodies recognize the spike protein would mean variants would not matter, as they assumed that variants that featured mutations on the spike protein that were not recognized by existing antigens would be less virulent.

Since these vaccines were first designed we have learned more about the virus and why some of these assumptions were incorrect. For example, the virus mutates more rapidly than previously assumed.

Prof. Altmann suggested that researchers could use this knowledge to develop new vaccines in the future, which target the parts of the virus genome that do not mutate, or at least do not do it as rapidly:

“We’re intelligent people, we know the structure of the spike and which bits are conserved and which bits are different. So surely, you know where on the virus we can hone in on for a vaccine. That’s against the bits that it can’t mutate.”

We are already seeing mRNA vaccine technology harnessed to target other viruses, such as HIV, and even experimental vaccines against cancer.

The development of a next generation of mRNA vaccines that target non-mutating parts of the virus genome could help us tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and lay the path for innovative vaccines that take on board our growing understanding of genomics and our immune systems.

Posted on

Jeff Zucker resigns from CNN over consensual relationship with key lieutenant

Zucker’s beautiful announcement came fewer than two months just after he fired primary time anchor Chris Cuomo for improperly advising his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, about how to tackle sexual misconduct allegations.

“As component of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was questioned about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, a person I have worked with for far more than 20 decades,” Zucker advised staff members in a memo. “I acknowledged the partnership progressed in latest decades. I was demanded to disclose it when it commenced but I did not. I was improper. As a outcome, I am resigning nowadays.”

Zucker did not name his colleague, but the marriage is with Allison Gollust, his critical lieutenant for the last two many years. Gollust is remaining at CNN.

Zucker and Gollust commenced working together at NBC in 1998. They rose by way of the ranks at the community alongside one another, and when Zucker joined CNN, Gollust was amongst his initially hires. Just before coming to CNN Gollust experienced worked briefly as communications director for Andrew Cuomo. She is at this time government vice president and chief advertising officer at CNN.

In a statement of her very own, Gollust said, “Jeff and I have been close close friends and experienced companions for in excess of 20 a long time. A short while ago, our relationship improved through COVID. I regret that we failed to disclose it at the correct time. I am exceptionally proud of my time at CNN and search ahead to continuing the fantastic perform we do each day.”

Zucker and Gollust both of those divorced from their companions several years back. Rumors that their near working romantic relationship experienced morphed into a romantic 1 have lengthy been the matter of speculation and have sometimes surfaced in gossip columns. The journalist Katie Couric, who at the time labored carefully with Zucker, but later on had a falling-out with him, even hinted at it in her inform-all memoir launched final year.

Information of Zucker’s resignation sent shockwaves within CNN and throughout the marketplace. CNN staff had no idea what was coming prior to Zucker’s email landed in their inboxes soon right after 11 a.m. ET.

Zucker spoke with some of CNN’s top executives on Wednesday morning, soon just before he announced his departure. He indicated that he would have preferred to continue to be on for a brief period, to assist with a sleek transition, but WarnerMedia needed in any other case.

According to two men and women associated in the make any difference, Zucker was going through termination if he did not resign.

Underscoring just how unforeseen the news was, some of Zucker’s immediate experiences were being out of the workplace and touring on Wednesday.

Kilar, who flew to New York to oversee the changeover, stepped in to operate the Wednesday conference Zucker commonly holds with his best executive workforce.

Kilar also programs to meet up with with staffers in Washington and Atlanta, a supply claimed.

WarnerMedia is in the method of merging with Discovery. Many media observers considered Zucker was in line for a marketing when that deal is finish. That is not the only motive this is a pivotal time for the network: CNN programs to start an formidable streaming services, CNN+, in the spring, and it also requirements to roll out a new 9 p.m. plan to swap Cuomo.

In an electronic mail to staffers Wednesday afternoon, Jason Kilar, the CEO of CNN parent WarnerMedia, explained 3 senior executives will direct CNN right until the merger with Discovery is complete: Michael Bass, Amy Entelis, and Ken Jautz.

“I have entire self-confidence that Michael, Amy and Ken, as interim heads for News, will present the leadership this firm demands for the duration of this time of changeover,” Kilar said, adding that personnel will “listen to additional” from the a few executives “in the coming days.”

Zucker, with Gollust on his leadership workforce, took in excess of CNN in 2013, at a time when field observers said the network was experiencing an identification crisis.

Zucker revamped the network’s programming. A veteran of NBC, in which he climbed from a producer on the “Currently” show to president of the entire network, Zucker introduced an eye for information and talent. He also introduced a hands-on administration design and style and obtained the have confidence in and respect of expertise and staffers in the course of the community.

In modern decades, Zucker led the community as it confronted sustained assaults from former President Trump and his supporters. Underneath Zucker, CNN adopted a “Info Very first” slogan and strategy to the information and was unrelenting in contacting out Trump for his lies.

The tactic turned Zucker into a villain for Trump, with the then-president lashing out at him all through his many years in place of work. Zucker also grew to become a standard boogeyman in proper-wing media, with Fox hosts viciously attacking him in prime time.

It was all proof of Zucker’s greater-than-lifetime standing in the information company and influence in excess of the broader discourse in American politics.

Fallout from Cuomo scandal

Zucker defended Chris Cuomo for the much better section of a calendar year even though critics claimed the anchorman should really have been benched or worse for what was then publicly recognised about how he’d recommended his brother. Zucker sooner or later fired Cuomo in early December, just after further revelations about how the brothers worked alongside one another to beat the allegations versus Andrew.

Ahead of getting action, CNN retained Cravath, a white-shoe regulation company, to review the Cuomo make any difference.

When Cuomo was fired, CNN reported that Cravath’s results on your own were “trigger to terminate.” But the network also claimed it had obtained an allegation of sexual misconduct from a “previous junior colleague” versus Chris Cuomo. Although Cuomo denied the allegation, a CNN spokesperson claimed at the time, “When new allegations arrived to us this week, we took them seriously, and saw no rationale to hold off having speedy motion.”

Cravath has continued its probe, in accordance to sources acquainted with the issue. One particular complicating component is Cuomo’s ongoing lawful struggle with CNN, which is evidently why Zucker was questioned about his romance with Gollust, a single of the resources mentioned.

According to WarnerMedia’s Requirements of Business Perform handbook, “staff have to not seek the services of or supervise (directly or indirectly) anyone with whom they have a personalized relationship, and if you are in a placement to influence the employment, improvement or selecting of someone with whom you have a own connection or a business they are connected with or have an curiosity in, you ought to notify the HR division in progress of getting any motion.”

Posted on

Bill Gates says COVID-19 vaccines are ‘missing two key things’

Novavax CEO Stanley Erck suggests the corporation is in the system of producing ‘quite a bit of doses and finding them out’ and notes that the vaccine will be ‘very effective’ versus the omicron pressure.

Invoice Gates, who donated $1.75 billion to COVID-19 vaccine improvement and preventing the pandemic, said this 7 days that when the at this time offered vaccines avoid significant illness and demise, they aren’t durable ample and should be much better at preventing infection. 

The Microsoft founder, whose net worthy of Forbes pegs at $135.9 billion, manufactured the responses in a Twitter discussion with Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public overall health at the College of Edinburgh Health care School. 

“The vaccines we have avert extreme sickness and death very nicely but they are missing two important factors,” Gates claimed to a question about what would make the biggest distinction in ending the pandemic. 

“Very first they however let infections (‘breakthrough’) and the length seems to be minimal. We need to have vaccines that prevent re-infection and have a lot of years of length.”

Monthly bill Gates speaks during the World-wide Investment decision Summit at the Science Museum on October 19, 2021 in London, England. (Photograph by Leon Neal – WPA Pool/Getty Photographs)

A modern College of Copenhagen review identified that the swift distribute of the omicron variant, which is now accountable for 98.3{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} of new scenarios in the United States, in accordance to the CDC, is probable due to its capability to greater evade immunity made available by vaccines and prior infection than earlier variants. 

PFIZER Claims OMICRON-Certain VACCINE TO BE Prepared BY MARCH

Gates mentioned that omicron will problem wellbeing devices as it turns into the dominant strain in other international locations around the entire world, but may well allow wellness officials to start off treating COVID-19 the similar way they observe endemic viruses like influenza. 

“After Omicron goes by way of a place then the rest of the year ought to see far less conditions so Covid can be addressed more like seasonal flu,” Gates stated Tuesday. 

An employee draws up a syringe with the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease at vaccination bus in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021. Germany battles rising numbers of coronavirus infections. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa via AP)

An personnel draws up a syringe with the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus and the COVID-19 sickness at vaccination bus in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021. Germany battles growing numbers of coronavirus infections. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa by way of AP)

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged European leaders this week to start out managing COVID-19 as an endemic virus rather of a pandemic, stating that overall health officers in Spain will quickly get started tracking it the same way they do the flu. 

GATES-FRENCH GATES Present OF $15B TOPS 2021 Major DONATION List

Nadhim Zahawi, the previous British minister for vaccine deployment and recent education secretary, instructed Sky News on Sunday that he hopes the United Kingdom “will be a person of the initially big economies to exhibit to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic.”

Vials of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines are completely ready to be injected to healthcare workers on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Gates gave a prescient Ted Chat in 2015 warning about the danger of a pandemic, indicating that if “anything at all kills about 10 million folks in the upcoming handful of a long time, it’s most most likely to be a remarkably infectious virus rather than a war.”

His philanthropic business, the Bill & Melinda Gates Basis, donated $1.75 billion to fighting the pandemic and developing COVID-19 vaccines. 

Click on Listed here TO Study Much more ON FOX Business

About two-thirds of the U.S. populace older than 5 are absolutely vaccinated towards COVID-19 and 79.2{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} have received at least just one dose, in accordance to CDC information. Of those people who are thoroughly vaccinated more than the age of 18, 39.8{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} have been given a booster dose. 

Posted on

The skin’s microbiome may play a key role

close up of wrinkled handsShare on Pinterest
New research finds that the skin’s microbiome and its bacterial pathways are involved in the skin aging process. fzant/Getty Images
  • A recent study published in the journal PLOS One has identified bacterial pathways associated with skin aging.
  • The data demonstrated that the main bacterial pathways related to aging involve the production of skin pigment, fatty acids, and ceramides.
  • Better understanding the molecular processes that drive skin aging and their relationship with the microbiome will require further research.
  • Data from prospective studies may help develop effective treatments to combat skin aging.

Bacteria, fungi, and viruses live on the skin and in the gut. The skin is the body’s largest organ, and it serves as a protective barrier from the outside environment.

Commensal microbial communities on the skin, also known as the skin microbiome, do not cause disease and benefit the body. They may be fixed or exist temporarily on the skin.

The skin microbiome interacts with the body’s immune system and may affect its functioning. And the immune system regulates the makeup of the skin microbiome.

Aging causes changes to the skin’s structure and function. This may result from “intrinsic” factors, such as hormonal, metabolic, or immune system changes. “Extrinsic” factors, such as smoking and exposure to sunlight and certain temperatures, may also trigger immune processes that affect the skin’s structure and rejuvenation.

Increased wrinkles, decreased elasticity, reduced wound healing, and impaired barrier function are skin changes that occur during aging.

Changes in the skin microbiome can also stem from a decline in the production of sebum, which is an oily substance that protects the skin, as well as from decreased water content in the skin and immune dysfunction.

Advanced scientific methods called 16S ribosomal RNA gene and metagenomic sequencing techniques are now available to assess changes in the skin’s microbes caused by aging.

Dr. Elizabeth Grice, an associate professor of dermatology and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in a 2019 lecture that the 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing technique allows us to “answer the questions [about] the composition of a sample or the diversity of a sample.”

She went on to say that “Shotgun metagenomics provides a more nuanced view of the skin microbiome. Using these methods, one can take a sample containing the genomic DNA, […] break up that DNA in the sample, and then sequence those fragments. This allows one to identify microbes to the species and strain level, it allows one to reconstruct the genetic and functional metabolic pathways within a sample and, importantly, it gives you a multi-kingdom view of the skin microbiome.”

Previous studies have demonstrated that the skin microbiomes of all humans consistently contains certain species of Staphylococcus, Cutibacterium, Corynebacterium, and Acinetobacter bacteria.

However, age, body area, gender, and geographic location affect the composition of the skin microbiome. Although previous studies had identified changes in the makeup of the skin microbiome related to aging, researchers had yet to fully understand the mechanisms behind these changes.

In a new study, a team from NIZO Food Research, in the Netherlands, set out to understand the connection between the body’s cellular processes, called co-metabolism, and genes, or bacterial functionalities, involved in skin aging. Estée Lauder, a company that sells skincare products, partially funded the study.

First, the researchers searched existing scientific literature to identify common biologic pathways between humans and skin microbes linked to intrinsic skin aging. They then used 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing testing from cheek samples of female participants with various age-related skin changes to confirm the changes to the skin microbiome composition seen in selected studies.

The team took skin swab samples, one from each cheek, from 25 healthy female participants of European descent in Belgium. The participants fell into two age groups, one aged 20–28, and the other aged 59–68.

The study excluded participants with certain skin conditions and external factors related to skin aging. Some of the exclusion criteria included:

  • acne
  • eczema
  • psoriasis
  • use of skin medications, such as antibiotics, antifungals, or steroids, within 1 month of the study
  • smoking, or a history of smoking in the past 2 years
  • tanning or sunbathing
  • drinking more than 3 servings of alcohol per day

The researchers gathered reference genomes from the gene sequences database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The information concerned genes relevant to skin aging, as identified and confirmed by testing.

The team then used microbial pathways to create graphical models, which they used to analyze the reference skin organism genomes, 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing testing, and data from the direct analysis of genomes from the collected skin samples.

The group found that bacterial pathways linked to skin aging were related to the production of ceramides, which are lipids that compose the natural skin barrier, as well as fatty acids and pigmentation. The researchers also determined that bacterial enzymes involved in protein glycation were associated with skin aging.

Protein glycation in the skin occurs when sugars link to proteins, such as collagen and elastin. An accumulation of glycation of collagen and elastin end products can result in loss of skin elasticity and sagging.

Dr. Dina F. Bierman, a board-certified dermatologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center, who was not involved in the study, explained to Medical News Today that:

“[The study] went one step beyond what we already knew. […] They separated the population based [on] how their skin had aged. […] Making that distinction is very important, in terms of understanding how the bacteria and their presence are influencing the skin and the metabolic processes that influence aging.”

One limitation of the study, however, is its small size and lack of diversity, which may limit the generalizability of its findings.

Overall, the results may serve as a basis for future studies seeking to improve our understanding of the interplay of molecular processes and the microbiome in skin aging.

Dr. Bierman described the study as a good starting point, but added that “A lot of research [is needed] before we can actually, for sure, say what the different bacteria are doing and how they interact with each [other], too, and might influence how our skin ages.”