Hello readers: today’s article is about how your lungs and your gut seem to interact: changes in gut microflora can affect lung activity, and vice versa. It is entitled, “Changes in the Bacterial Microbiota in Gut, Blood, and Lungs Following Acute LPS Instillation into Mice Lungs”. LPS is short for lipopolysaccharide, which is a component of the surface of some bacteria.
Here they were looking at total bacterial counts in blood and in the cecum (a region of the gut), as well as the microbiome composition present in lung fluid, blood, and the cecum. They found that adding LPS (it’s not clear what species the LPS is from, or if it is from a mixture of species) changed total bacterial counts in the cecum as well as the blood, and that adding antibiotics could reduce the changes seen in blood.
This evidence supports prior work indicating that, bacteria may translocate from the gut to the blood (where perhaps they interact with lung tissue) and indicates that the lungs- much like the gut- contain a large and diverse population of bacteria. More work is needed to characterize this environment and determine relationships between lung bacteria and lung dysfunction. The link to gut bacteria is also interesting- could this be why there are websites recommending different foods for helping people with asthma? Studies are inconclusive, but that may be expected if people weren’t taking the starting gut community into account when designing studies intended to determine if diet changes help asthma. A link between diet, your gut microbes, your lung microbes, and your breathing suggests all kinds of new ways to help treat asthma, and possibly other lung problems as well.