The intestines of absolutely any person in the world can be called a real home for a huge number of microorganisms that are actively involved in ensuring the normal functioning of the human body. So, part of the bacteria helps us with digestion, while the other part helps the immune system to function and protects us from the invasion of some pathogenic bacteria. Scientists studying intestinal bacteria have come to the conclusion that the microbiome is a kind of biological clock that can predict the age of most people.

Bacteria that live in the intestines of a person can tell about his age

Intestinal bacteria can tell about the age of their “host”
In order to find out exactly how the microbiome of the human intestine changes over time, the American company InSilico Medicine studied about 3,600 samples of intestinal bacteria obtained from 1,165 subjects living around the world.

To conduct an unusual experiment, the team from InSilico Medicine used a special deep learning algorithm that was specially modeled according to an algorithm similar to the operation of brain neurons. The result was able to exceed all expectations: a unique program was able to guess the age of people with an error of approximately 4 years. In addition, it turned out that out of 95 types of bacteria that live in the human intestines, 39 types of microorganisms were the most important in predicting the estimated age of the subject.

The idea that you can most likely correctly predict someone’s age based on the intestinal microbiome data can confuse people far from scientific knowledge. However, such information can be of great interest to scientists studying aging processes.

The experiment was able to show that some microbes capture large areas of the body as a person ages. So, Eubacterium hallii, which is considered an important participant in the metabolism in the intestine, becomes at the same time almost the most common. At the same time, with age, the number of Bacteroides vulgatus bacteria, which often cause inflammation in the human digestive tract and are directly associated with ulcerative colitis, is significantly reduced. Compliance with diet, sleep and physical activity, most likely, only contributes to such changes.

The authors of the study argue that finding such “hours of aging” of a person’s microbiome can be used to check how quickly or slowly a person’s intestines age. In addition, the presence of certain bacteria in the intestines of the body can be greatly influenced by the use of alcoholic beverages, drugs, food additives, or even a diet. Absolutely all of these factors can affect the duration of our lives. If so, then scientists hope that the results of the study can be used to identify some dangerous diseases, among which is Alzheimer’s syndrome.

At the same time, the main problem of such an unusual theory about the aging of the body is the fact that despite its universal applicability in determining the age of a person, there are huge differences in which bacteria are present in the intestines of people living in different parts of the world. As mentioned above, diet, the presence of certain diseases, and, of course, age, can affect the number of bacteria.