Faecalibacterium prausnitzii tagged posts

Worldwide, more than one billion people are obese. Obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers. But permanently losing weight isn’t easy: complex interactions between body systems such as gut physiology, hormones, and the brain are known to work against it. One method for weight loss is intermittent energy restriction (IER), where days of relative fasting alternate with days of eating normally.

“Here we show that an IER diet changes the human brain-gut-microbiome axis. The observed changes in the gut microbiome and in the activity in addition-related brain regions during and after weight loss are highly dynamic and coupled over time,” said last author Dr...

Rick Spurr, surrounded by some of his grandchildren, was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, which was discovered on his lungs while he was fighting off a bout of pneumonia. Credit: UT Southwestern

Individuals with certain types of bacteria in their gut may be more likely to respond well to cancer immunotherapy, researchers at the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center found in a study of patients with metastatic melanoma. The incidence of melanoma has been increasing over the past 40 years. Immunotherapies have dramatically improved the outlook for patients with metastatic melanoma in the past half-dozen years, but still only about half of these patients go into remission.

UT Southwestern cancer researchers analyzed the gut bacteria of 39 melanoma patients who were treated with imm...

Scanning electron microscopy images of F. prausnitzii grown in LYBHI medium.

Oral administration of a commensal gut microbe, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, improves fatty liver in mice. F. prausnitzii is considered one of the most important bacterial indicators of a healthy gut. Due to the central role of liver in the whole body metabolism, fatty liver is a major health problem. In Finland alone, it affects around 1,000,000 people of the general population and has an occurrence of 90% among obese individuals. Humans with high liver fat content had less F. prausnitzii and more inflammation in the subcutaneous adipose tissue. The researchers, therefore, decided to study whether oral F...