Month: November 2016

What distortions in my gut microbiome can have a dramatic impact on my health?

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Gut microbiome composition, with exceptions that I’ll discuss below, is remarkably stable, particularly in adults. Although probiotics are expected to be a $45B business by 2018, their effects on microbiome composition are small and transient. A recent meta-analysis of seven randomized control trials found “a lack of evidence for an impact of probiotics on fecal Read More …

What is the immune response during a course of bacteriostatic antibiotics (e.g. clindamycin)?

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The default assumption is that antibiotics have no clinically measurable effect on immunity. But several lines of evidence bring that assumption into question. Basically, there are three pathways by which antibiotics could affect the immune response: Altering gene expression in bacteria. Some bacteria, most notably S. aureus, have devised elaborate and extensive mechanisms to evade and defeat Read More …