New fecal index may provide a risk of imminent death: PREVISED WITH 84% precision mortality in the next 30 days.
There is a new method for assessing the risk of death in critical patients. And involves… the feces of the patient.
A new study by the University of Chicago and Amsterdam proposes an index based on the analysis of metabolites present in the stool, able to predict the likelihood of mortality within the period of 30 dias.
The innovative metabolic dysbiosis score (MDS) is based on the detection of imbalances in the intestinal microbiota-a condition known as metabolic dysbiosis – which may be directly linked to the severity of the clinical status of patients admitted to intensive care units.
According to researchers, cited by and led by Alexander de Porto, the approach could become a useful tool in precision medicine by helping to identify patients at higher risk and guide more effective treatment strategies.
To create MDS, scientists analyzed 196 -sample samples with respiratory failure or septic shock, divided between a training group (147 patients) and a validation group (49 patients). The index was built based on the concentrations of 13 distinct fecal metabolites, including short chain fatty acids, bile acids and tryptophan metabolites.
The results were promising. In the training group, MDS predicted with 84% precision Mortality cases, with a sensitivity of 89% and a specificity of 71%. However, in the validation group, despite similar trends, the results did not achieve statistical significance, something that the authors attribute to the reduced number of participants.
Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, the diversity of microbiota does not seem to be associated with the risk of death, according to the study at Science Advances on June 4. What was most relevant was the degree of dysbiosis, which reinforces the importance of intestinal metabolites as independent indicators of the patients’ clinical status.
Despite the potential of the discovery, scientists stress that more studies are needed to validate MDS in different populations and to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between identified metabolites and the risk of mortality.
