Gut bacteria, viruses may increase risk of type 2 diabetes

Of the estimated 530 million adults with diabetes worldwide, about 98% have type 2 diabetes, and new research suggests that certain intestinal bacteria and viruses may increase the incidence of type 2 diabetes.

It’s important to note that type 2 diabetes is a disease in which the body becomes resistant to the hormone insulin, which is essential for properly processing blood sugar. Insulin resistance causes a person’s blood sugar levels to remain high.

While a variety of factors, such as age, play a role in determining whether a person will develop type 2 diabetes, scientists have recently been investigating the role of the gut microbiome in increasing a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The researchers analyzed data from the Microbiome and Cardiometabolic Disease Consortium (MicroCardio) for this study.

The data included 8,117 gut microbiome metagenomes from participants of varying ethnicities and from different regions, including the United States, China, Israel, and Germany.

“While research over the past decade has linked changes in the gut microbiome to the development of type 2 diabetes, earlier studies were too small and their designs varied widely to allow for reliable conclusions to be drawn,” said Daniel (Dong) Wang, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the Channing Network Medicine Division at the Brigham and co-corresponding author of the study.

He said Medical News Today: “There are still large gaps in understanding the mechanisms linking the gut microbiota and type 2 diabetes, especially the biological pathways encoded by specific microbial strains.”

At the end of the study, Wang and his team reported that they had found several microbes and their functions in the gut microbiome that were associated with the development of type 2 diabetes.

Researchers have discovered a strain of gut microbe, P. copri, that produces large amounts of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs). Furthermore, this strain is more common in the gut microbiota of people with type 2 diabetes.

Additionally, the researchers found evidence that bacteriophages (viruses that infect only bacterial cells) may also cause changes in specific bacterial strains in the gut microbiome, increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes.