{"id":88370,"date":"2019-03-04T07:02:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T15:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/linking-bacterial-populations-with-health"},"modified":"2019-03-04T07:02:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T15:02:50","slug":"linking-bacterial-populations-with-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/linking-bacterial-populations-with-health","title":{"rendered":"Linking bacterial populations with health"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/linking-bacterial-populations-with-health.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The biggest source of variability in the microbiome is the person-to-person variability. It\u2019s a problem if you\u2019re looking for causality. That\u2019s a red flag word for us \u2013 causality \u2013 meaning something about the bacterial community causes some disease. You actually don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s the bacteria or whether the bacteria are a sign of something that happened before. It\u2019s very much individualized, so everybody\u2019s history matters.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>We are all teeming with bacteria that help us digest food or fight disease, but two people might play host to a very different array of bacteria due to diet, where they live, hobbies or even medical histories.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, scientists have struggled to understand which bacteria are linked to disease and which protect against it. Studies comparing people\u2019s bacterial companions \u2013 known as the microbiome \u2013 to explore what that variation means might disagree because they analyzed different groups or didn\u2019t sample enough people.<\/p>\n<p>Statistics Professor Susan Holmes thinks one way of teasing out which differences are relevant to disease and which are just differences between people could come down to statistics and repeating studies.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2019-03-linking-bacterial-populations-health.html\">https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2019&#45;03-linking-bacterial...ealth.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The biggest source of variability in the microbiome is the person-to-person variability. It\u2019s a problem if you\u2019re looking for causality. That\u2019s a red flag word for us \u2013 causality \u2013 meaning something about the bacterial community causes some disease. You actually don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s the bacteria or whether the bacteria are a sign of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,1495],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}