Dr Nick Shackel
So the microbiome is the organisms that sit within our gut that have a really important role in determining our overall health as well as our gut health. And in fact some people refer to the microbiome, the microorganisms in our gut, as the largest organ within our body. We have more organisms in our gut than we have cells in our body. And these organisms determine everything from our response to inflammatory disease, our risk of developing inflammatory conditions, our risk of developing cancer, the way we react to insults from our environment. And it’s now generally recognised that we can actually look at better health for a range of conditions, not just gut conditions, by maintaining a healthy microbiome. And I’ll give you some really way out examples of how this is now influencing our medical practice. I’m a gastroenterologist but I also look after people with liver disease and we know, for instance, if we look at the microorganisms in somebody’s mouth, and we can do that now with a swab, and this isn’t a routine test but something that’s come out of basic research, we can look at how they’re going to respond in future to insults to their liver. We know that conditions that are associated with chronic inflammation, the way our bodies respond to them can be set by our microbiome. It’s a very active organ within our body. All these microorganisms that are within our gut are influenced by everything we eat, exposure to antibiotics. And it’s an incredibly under-recognised but incredibly common now source of modification of how disease present or directly causative of many diseases. The most obvious example of that is infectious diarrhoea, but then it’s got a major influence on things such as irritable bowel or inflammatory bowel disease.
