In a study involving data from thousands of people, the risk of a new coronary heart disease diagnosis was statistically associated with bloodstream levels of nine specific molecules that are produced by gut microbes. Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, U.S., and colleagues present these findings on March 17th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.
The human digestive tract naturally contains a large population of microbes. Different people have different proportions of different species of gut microbes, which produce different molecules during their normal, metabolic chemical reactions. These metabolites can enter the bloodstream and exert a broad range of impacts, good and bad, on human health. Some gut microbe metabolites may be linked with a person’s risk of coronary heart…