Gut bacteria may lower risk of heart disease

Washington:  Supplements of a type of gut bacteria may benefit people at heightened risk of diabetes and heart disease, a preliminary study suggests.

Researchers found that the supplements, containing bacteria called Akkermansia muciniphila, appear safe and potentially effective.

Over three months, volunteers who used a pasteurized version of the supplement lost an average of 5 pounds, meanwhile, their cholesterol levels dipped and the progression of their "pre-diabetes" slowed.

The study was small, and designed as a "proof-of-principle" -- aimed at showing the bacteria can be packaged into a supplement and taken safely.

The researchers said the initial results were promising.

"The aim is now to design a larger study,"Patrice Cani, a senior researcher and a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brussels, Belgium said.

Researchers have known for years that Akkermansia is less abundant in the guts of people who are obese or have type 2 diabetes."But that was just a simple correlation," Cani said. So several years ago, his team started to look deeper.

First, they found that in lab mice, Akkermansia -- given as live bacteria -- helped prevent weight gain from a high-fat diet.

The reason, Cani explained, seemed to be that the bacteria were "reinforcing the gut barrier."

That led to less leaking of substances into the blood -- which allowed the body to better control blood sugar, and use sugar and fat more efficiently.

Later experiments showed that pasteurizing the bacteria boosted the benefits of live Akkermansia.

But until now, no one had tried giving the bacteria to people.

The study was published online July 1 in Nature Medicine and it's the latest to delve into the gut "microbiome" -- the trillions of bacteria and other microbes that populate the digestive tract.

Research has been revealing that those microbes may have wide-ranging effects on our health -- from metabolism to immune defenses to brain function.

The makeup of the gut microbiome has been linked to the risks of conditions as diverse as obesity, autoimmune diseases and depression.