Changes to Gut Microbiome Increases Type 2 Diabetes Risk: Harvard Medical School

In its kind of largest and most diverse research till now, the Harvard Medical School researchers have investigated the link between the gut microbiome and Type 2 diabetes. Once the findings are confirmed, it will help in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes as altering the gut microbiome might result in a reduction of this type of diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes occurs when a patient's blood sugar level gets too high and this disease affects approximately 537 million people worldwide. According to an ethnically and geographically comprehensive, and largest study on this subject conducted by the Harvard Medical School, your gut condition can predict your chances of developing Type 2 diabetes.

The researchers studied the gut microbiome of people affected with Type 2 diabetes and that of healthy people with proper levels of glucose. Gut microbiome is collection of fungi, bacteria and viruses collected from the intestines. The scientists found a link between the gut condition and Type 2 diabetes. This finding can be crucial in developing future treatments for diabetic people. Researchers over the past decade believed that there is a significant link between these two, however, these researches were conducted on a small size and hence the researchers were not able to draw the exact conclusion.

Daniel (Dong) Wang, co-corresponding author and Harvard Medical School assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital said, “The microbiome is highly variable across different geographic locations and racial and ethnic groups. If you only study a small, homogeneous population, you will probably miss something."

Curtis Huttenhower, co-corresponding author, professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said, "The gut microbiome's relationship to complex, chronic, heterogeneous diseases like type 2 diabetes is quite subtle. Large and diverse populations are necessary — and increasingly feasible — for detailed microbiome variation studies.”

More Details of the Study

The gut microbiomes were collected from a total of 8,117 people of which some had normal blood glucose levels, others had prediabetes and diabetes and these people came from ethnically and geographically different areas including France, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Israel, the United States, Sweden and China.

"The researchers found a consistent set of microbial species that were linked to type 2 diabetes across their study populations, including many that had never been reported before. To understand the role of these microbes in the gut, the researchers analyzed the species’ functional abilities. They found that certain strains of microbes had functions that may be linked to varied type 2 diabetes risk," reads the official statement of Harvard Medical School.

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