Last year, I screwed it up when I started a book on a topic that seemed to go nowhere – I quit working on it, not before publishing a blog post here. Nowadays, I’m working on another one trying to answer several questions of mine and putting hypotheses out there. Our DNA mostly remains the same with age, but our gene expression or the collection of microorganisms living on and inside us do not. I’m trying to find out whether transplanting a specific community of microorganisms from an earlier stage of life to a later one has any effect on aging and hopefully, lifespan. And I’m also wondering whether the microbiota or the ecosystem of microorganisms we share our body with could be used as drugs to manipulate the gene expression of the host. From clinical practice I know many patients run away from invasive procedures and surgery unless life-threating and pain-killing. Some patients also have an issue with being on pills, especially on the longer term. But most of them accept them after all as taking pills is as ‘invasive’ as eating. Probiotics are currently administered as pills and if they could be used as vehicles for changing gene expression, they could one day form the basis of many anti-aging therapies.
And while doing my research, I stumbled upon a book by Michael Lustgarden called ‘Microbial burden: a major cause of aging and age-related disease‘ with interesting data to back up the increased age-related infectious load we carry with plenty of bacteria being found in atheroma plaques especially in patients with poor oral health and the amyloid plaques from Alzheimer-inflicted patients which may be the body’s way of attacking micro intruders that shouldn’t be there. The amyloid is an anti-microbial peptide and plenty of microorganisms were found inside the amyloid plaques, the one I remembered best being Herpes simplex virus type I which is so frequent in the human population.
The main hypothesis of the book is that aging is caused by all this infectious burden or at least that the latter could be at the root of aging. I don’t agree with this hypothesis and I’ll tell you why in a minute, but I do agree that bacteria ‘invade’ us with aging. And it’s not only because our immune system ages and forgets about protecting the gates to our body. But the sheer fabric of our body – intracellular bridges and cell membranes – disassembles and decays so the bacteria and other microorganisms forming our microbiota easily enter our bodies just because they can. And who refuses free hosting?
While Michael Lustgarden makes no mention of this, I wonder if the lifespan increase given by public measures of hygiene can be explained by fewer microorganisms ready to enter our bodies as we age. All these microorganisms roaming freely through our blood vessels and other tissues could explain the increased inflammation with age and maybe also the opportunistic infections giving the deadly blow to the elderly through urinary infections or pneumonia. The book’s author mentions that this infectious load could also be involved in telomere shortening, but I’m not so convinced as the only example given is of lymphocytes. These white blood cells are the ones dealing with microbes so it is to be expected they will be the ones taking the hit, including having their telomere shortening accelerated. But what happens in post-mitotic cells like brain or heart cells? Do their telomeres shorten faster in people with chronic infections? And are there any differences in telomere shortening between infections attacking these post-mitotic cells predominantly and those that do not? Those were the kinds of examples I expected to link infectious load with telomere shortening. Because the latter is only dangerous if the cell can’t divide anymore and if there are no/fewer cells to substitute its function.
Now I must search whether there are studies on the microbiota in negligible senescence species since many of them live in extreme environments which are not welcome to most predators or microorganisms, environments which are often cold or low in nutrients or low in oxygen – does their microbiota also change with the stage of life? But since this would take me months for the next book, I’ll end up this blog post with a couple of good tips I learned from his book to postpone the infectious burden of aging as much as possible:
- consume a high-fiber diet to maintain your normal gut microbiota. I’d also add the consumption of fermented food to sustain the microorganism ecosystem living in our gut, things like pickles, yogurt and the like. Yes, I know, there are plenty of fermented drinks which contain alcohol as a side-product and I have no idea whether your microbiota will like it or not. What if those bacteria get drunk and become violent? 🙂
- regularly brush your teeth, your tongue and floss. I appreciated his tip of gargling with diluted peppermint oil which kills P. gingivalis at 0.4% – this bacteria is involved in periodontal disease.
- clean your skin with a solution or a soap whose pH is around 5 which is the normal pH of healthy skin. Anything higher than that value will favor the growth of pathogenic skin microbiota. You’d be amazed how many cleansers and soaps have much higher pH values in the range of 10-11. Before I read this book, it never occurred to me to check the pH of a soap before buying it. Now I will.
And that’s about it. Not so much about the nose/lung gate, although a normal gut microbiota is associated with normal flora at the upper level too.
To sum it up, probiotics are nowadays usually prescribed together and/or following antibiotics. I wonder whether this could be taken one step further where microorganisms specific to younger stages of life could be administered for maintenance at an older age. Each one of us has a stable and specific population of microorganisms, but there are some big patterns common to the whole species and to certain stages of life. And yet, since each microorganism occupies a body niche, would the bacteria from our younger selves be able to survive in the new older body environment? We are different persons today compared to yesterday.
Anca Ioviţă is the author of Eat Less Live Longer: Your Practical Guide to Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition ,The Aging Gap Between Species and What Is Your Legacy? 101Ways on Getting Started to Create and Build One available on Amazon and several other places. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to sign up to receive updates on longevity news and novel book projects!
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Though I use probiotics, mostly in the form of raw sauerkraut, there remains a nagging doubt as to whether this does anything at all in the human gut. The problem, as I understand it, is that the human gut is a vastly different environment versus some supplement manufacturer’s stainless vat. Some benefit more than others:
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-microbes-probiotics.html
Some can also be harmed. Anything that contains acidophilus causes me upset stomach.
I also have my own doubts regarding current commercial probiotics because they mostly contain 1-2 species of bacteria while the human gut contains much more. But this field could certainly be personalized in the near future depending on your genome, lifestyle, previous diseases and so on. Waiting for some platform for designer probiotics 🙂
I know it sounds pretentious and arrogant what I’m going to say,
I have found what could be the main cause of aging and its associated diseases, I say, could, because we know that is a multifactorial process with a genetic character. There may be other factors, but the factor found has a lot of weight. The problem is that there is a lot of excepticism, I do not find funding for research, and the solution I found is in pause.
Ruben Lopez
Biologist
Have you heard of the Juggernaut concept? It’s about making do with what you have and being creative. I don’t know exactly what you found or think you found, but in this day and age, publishing is free and patent provisional application is around $65 in USA and you have 1 year afterwards to apply for the patent. During this time, you could present your idea safely to investors and companies for licensing. And then there are all these exponential technologies – 3D printing included – where you can prototype your idea on the cheap.
Infectious Burden presents a provocative thesis, and we will undoubtedly learn much more about the role of microbes in aging in the years to come.
Late-reader here, but here’s my opinion:
– attacking microorganisms definitely speed up the aging, even if they may not be the very root of it (maybe the root should be searched in the “normal” development at the transition between childhood and adulthood?)
– there is a biohacker I read about, Josiah Zayner, who replaced his skin and gut microbiome (due to some condition). I wonder if such experiments could be done on a larger scale in other animals, with replacing one’s microbiome with the microbiome from a younger individual.
– up untill 3 weeks ago, all my toothcare was brushing teeth 2x daily, and avoiding any sugary drinks/foods (not just for teeth). I thought that was enough, ignoring my sister’s advice for flossing and dental checkups. Alas, I was wrong, and 2 weeks ago I got one molar taken out due to periodonal disease. And there was nothing obviously wrong in my mouth, except for the big pain for a week before extraction (nothing like in the illustrations of this disease on wikipedia and other places). The inflamation was hidden beneath the gum, where it developed a pocket and later produced bone loss.
NOW I floss every day, brush teeth after each meal, and also use a mouthwash from time to time.
– pH of the soap, how do you find it out? I just checked 4 bottles of soap/shampoos in my house, none had pH given. Perhaps a home-made chemistry test to use?
Cheers!
Agree, correlation does not mean causation.
I thought about this too after noticing how abundant the microbiota of negligibly senescent species like sponges and corals is.
Flossing could be more important than brushing because it removes food from exactly those places where cavities are more likely. My dental hygienist told me to floss before brushing and not the other way around because otherwise those little food pieces may be pushed even deeper under the gums.
I never found the pH of the soap either but I’d use an aquarium pH test kit if I wanted to find that out. I don’t worry much about higher pH values because I buy soap for oily skin and this is more likely to contain astringent substances which decrease the pH.
OK, I will floss before brushing. Flossing more often… I should make a habbit to floss teeth just as a break, more than 1x/day.
.it’s becoming a little time consuming chore, you know, all this toothcare… I wish our teeth kept re-growing like the baby/milk teeth (or like in sharks) 🙂
For pH, maybe SOME soaps do have it on the label. Or else, I see pH test strips on the market (litmus paper and similar)