Intestinal microbiome analyses, whose cost is not exactly low, are worth as much as a trip to the fortune teller on the corner, says a new study. It’s throwing money down the toilet.
Imagine sending your feces to two different companies — which, by the way, is not illegal, as long as the shipment does not smell or stain anything, and the packaging and labeling are appropriate.
In this hypothetical scenario, both companies, A and B, propose to analyze their sample in search of bacteria it contains, with the aim of giving you a clearer picture of your intestinal health and how to improve it. In the United States, the cost of this type of analysis is around 1,000 dollars, approximately 860 euros.
What if the results from these two companies were comparable to what you would get if you sent your sample to company A and a friend sent his for company B? Would this “fecal astrology” be worth it, at the price it is charged?
Then This is precisely what it shows a surprising one, the results of which were recently published in the journal Communications Biology: The study authors sent a standardized stool sample to 7 different companies, and the results were completely different.
According to the authors of the study, conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the results of the analyzes were so variable that they could have straight out of a dice game.
The microbiome is in fashion. The study of the microorganisms that inhabit our intestines and our skin has produced promising preliminary results about their role in health, but the promises are not easily monetized, paving the way for entrepreneurial spirits to find creative business models.
The model is based on direct-to-consumer sales kits (DTC), similar to , which carries out genetic analyzes based on DNA samples, with the difference that the biological sample it sends does not come from your mouth, explains the Canadian molecular geneticist Jonathan Jerry in an article on .
In the case of microbiome analysis services, the company’s scientists analyze the sample and send you a detailed report, including, for example, the abundance of bacteria families such as Bifidobacterium ea Faecalibacteriumand give you advice on how to improve your health.
It turns out that the report often includes the prescription of a supplement feed — that the company itself sells.In the world we live in, it is not surprising that the same business sell both the problem and the solution.
Before the NIST study, some people had already tested gut microbiome kits from different companies and reported their discrepancies. One user complained that the health advice he was sold after spending $130 on a kit was something you can find on any government website: do more exercise and eat more fruits and vegetables.
Another person, who released his impressions a decade ago, at the beginning of this trend, said that know the Latin names of all bacterias in your feces It was fascinating, but also frustrating.: What are they there for and what do they do? Companies today provide more details, but are they even rigorous?
The companies were not identified in the article, a common practice in this type of investigation to avoid legal proceedings. A NIST employee created accounts with a personal email address so that companies would not suspect that they could be the target of a study. Three kits were ordered from each company to check the consistency of results.
Jarry considers that it is probably companies don’t know what they are doingbecause our knowledge of the gut microbiome is not deep or specific enough.
One of the companies, which, it is worth remembering, did not realize that it had received three kits with exactly the same stool sample,— considered that one of them had below average intestinal health, while the other two were classified as above average.
This is an extreme example of the many discrepancies that the authors detected both within each company and between companies. The seven companies tested for the presence of C. difficilea bacteria often contracted in a hospital environment and which makes us sick: three companies claimed to have found it in the sample, while the other four said they were not presente.
The reason the results are so different is that choices need to be made at each stage of the process — choices that influence final resultssays Jarry: How do you collect feces? What buffer solution does the company provide to conserve them? How long do you wait before sending them? What technique does the company use to extract the genetic material from the bacteria in the sample? What sequencing technology is used? How do you analyze the volumes of results obtained?
Any change in any of these steps changes what is detected and reported, highlights the molecular geneticist.
Furthermore, the definition of “healthy microbiome” is not yet established. Healthy skin, for example, is not a single thing. Likewise, a healthy gut microbiome is likely a range, not a single, defined ideal.
And without this standardization, direct-to-consumer selling of microbiome analyzes from stool samples is nothing more than a primitive pseudoscience and somewhat predatory, concludes Jarry. In practice, it is the throw money down the toilet.
