Summary: Genetic factors account for approximately 33% of the variation in trust levels between individuals, highlighting the heritable nature of this crucial social trait. The research utilized data from twins and a comprehensive analysis of previous studies to explore the genetic and environmental influences on trust.
Findings from this study not only underscore trust’s complexity but also its impact on social and economic outcomes. By revealing the significant genetic component behind trust, the study opens new avenues for understanding and enhancing trust in various domains, from personal relationships to political engagement.
Key Facts:
Genetic Contribution: Around 33% of individual differences in trust levels can be attributed to genetics, as demonstrated by comparing identical and fraternal twins.
Impact of Life Circumstances: Factors such as age, health status, and marital status also play a crucial role in influencing an individual’s propensity to trust.
Domain-Specific Trust: The study highlights that trust varies across domains, indicating that a person’s trust level in social settings may differ significantly from their trust in political institutions.
Source: University of Technology Sydney
Trust, a cornerstone of human interaction, has a significant genetic component, with around 33% of the variation between individuals attributed to our genes, according to new Australian research using data from twins and a meta-analysis of previous studies on the heritability of trust.
Successful relationships, economic transactions and social cohesion are all a matter of trust. Without trust, businesses collapse, political parties fail, and conflicts erupt, whether on a personal or international scale, resulting in broken hearts and lives lost.
Behavioural aspects of trust were measured using a trust game where participants are required to share money with another person.
“Higher levels of trust are associated with a range of social and economic benefits, so understanding the factors that influence our tendency to trust others could be used to improve community wellbeing,” said lead author Dr Nathan Kettlewell.
Dr Kettlewell, from the University of Technology Sydney, and Professor Agnieszka Tymula, from the University of Sydney, work at the crossroads of economics, psychology and neuroscience to investigate how heritable behavioural traits such as trust influence life outcomes.
Their study, Heritability across different domains of trust, was recently published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. It shows that trust is a complex trait that can be measured in a range of ways, including using twin studies.
“Twin studies are a powerful tool for disentangling genetic and environmental influences on complex traits, as they allow us to compare similarities in trust levels between identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, and fraternal twins, who share on average 50% of their genes,” said Dr Kettlewell.
“Our findings suggest that while genetic factors contribute around 33% to the variation in levels of trust observed among individuals, life circumstances such as being older, in better health and married or in a de facto relationship also increase trust,” he said.
The Australian component of the study enlisted 1120 twins and examined levels of trust using survey data to assess general trust and trust in politicians. Behavioural aspects of trust were measured using a trust game where participants are required to share money with another person.
“Trust is a trait that is difficult to define and measure, and it can also change across different domains. For example, someone might show high levels of trust in social relationships but low levels of trust in politics,” said Professor Tymula.
“Our results don’t imply that people with certain genes are doomed to be high or low in trust. However, when we reflect on our own behaviour, and that of people we know, it’s important to recognise that heritability is a component.
“This can affect how we see ourselves, and how we treat others. For example, recognising a person’s distrust in politicians is partly due to the lottery of genes, we might come to appreciate why someone who grows up in similar circumstances can have such different beliefs.”
While the findings highlight the significant role of genetics in trust, it’s crucial to recognise that environmental factors such as upbringing, cultural norms, and life experiences all interact with genetic predispositions to influence an individual’s trust.
Understanding the foundations of trust opens up avenues for further research in fields such as economics, psychology, and sociology as well as practical applications aimed at fostering trust, cooperation, and social wellbeing across diverse contexts.
Abstract
Heritability across different domains of trust
Using a large sample of 1,120 twins and the multivariate ACE-Cholesky model, we estimated the heritability of trust using four distinct measures of trust – domain-specific political trust, general self-reported trust, and incentivized behavioral trust and trustworthiness.
Across the different measures of trust we consider, our estimates for heritability range from 1 % to 37 %. Furthermore, the environmental correlates of trust also vary across the different measures with political trust having the largest set of environmental covariates.
To reconcile the variation in the estimated heritability of trust in the literature, we provide a meta-analysis of the heritability of behavioral and stated trust.
Now, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute have added to the list of potentially modifiable risk factors with a new study reporting high levels of a common B vitamin called niacin in the body may contribute to cardiovascular disease.
Finding a potential link between niacin and heart disease was not the original intention of this study, Dr. Stanley Hazen, The Jan Bleeksma Chair in Vascular Cell Biology and Atherosclerosis, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics & Prevention, and director of the Center for Microbiome & Human Health at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, and lead author of this study told Medical News Today.
“Our initial goal was to identify new pathways that contribute to heart disease. Even when treating cardiovascular disease risk factors to goal (e.g. cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, etc.), the majority of events (heart attack, stroke, death) continue to occur, or at best, we reduce the event rate by 50%. This means there are other pathways we are not addressing,” Dr. Hazen explained.
Dr. Hazen said he and his team were looking for compounds in the blood that might contribute to the future development of heart attack, stroke, or death independent of traditional risk factors.
“The compound 4PYTrusted Source was identified that is linked to future CVD events — in a U.S. cohort initially, then replication in a U.S. cohort, and further validation in a European cohort,” he continued.
“We then performed preclinical studies (animal model) and cell-based studies — all of which showed this compound contributes to vascular inflammation. 4PY, it turns out, is a breakdown product made from excess niacin,” he told MNT.
Niacin can also naturally be found in legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. And there are also some foods, such as cereals and breads, fortified with niacin.
The body does not store niacin — any excess not used is removed from the body via urine.
For this study, Dr. Hazen and his team studied the fasting plasma from about 1,100 people with stable cardiac health.
Upon analysis, researchers discovered that higher circulating levels of N1-methyl-4-pyridone-3-carboxamide, or 4PY, were strongly associated with the development of a heart attack, stroke, or other unhealthy cardiac events.
“Our studies found high levels of 4PY in the blood predict future cardiac disease. These new studies help identify a new pathway that contributes to heart disease,” Dr. Hazen said.
However, Dr. Hazen said the main takeaway for readers is not that we should cut out our entire intake of niacin — that’s not a realistic or healthy approach.
OTC niacin supplements
“Given these findings, a discussion over whether a continued mandate of flour and cereal fortification with niacin in the U.S. could be warranted. Patients should consult with their doctors before taking over-the-counter supplements and focus on a diet rich in fruit and vegetables while avoiding excess carbohydrates.” — Dr. Stanley Hazen
Scientists also found that 4PY directly triggers vascular inflammation, which can damage blood vessels and lead to a buildup of plaque on artery walls, known as atherosclerosis.
“Atherosclerosis is caused by both high cholesterol and inflammation. We know how to treat the high cholesterol side of the equation, but not the inflammation side. This pathway appears to be a major participant in vascular inflammation,” Dr. Hazen said.
“(Our) research uncovered that excess niacin fuels inflammation (and) cardiovascular disease through a newly discovered pathway. (These) findings are significant because they provide a foundation for potential new interventions and therapeutics to reduce or prevent inflammation.” — Dr. Stanley Hazen
Dr. Hazen said that now with the discovery of this link, there is much more research to do.
“On the one hand, we need to explore what other cardiovascular diseases/phenotypes are linked to 4PY since vascular inflammation is a fundamental contributor to many diseases/phenotypes — e.g. heart failure, stroke, (and) other forms of vascular disease,” he explained.
“Beyond this, we then want to focus on how to disrupt this pathway to leverage the newly gained knowledge to develop a therapeutic,” he added.
MNT also spoke with Dr. Cheng-Han Chen, a board certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills, CA, about this study.
“This study identifies excess niacin, specifically its breakdown metabolite 4PY, as a risk factor for major adverse cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke,” Dr. Chen explained.
“While niacin was previously prescribed as acholesterol-lowering medicationTrusted Source, its use has fallen out of favor as multiple studies did not find as much benefit to cardiovascular health as initially thought. This study will put another nail in the coffin for the use of niacin in heart disease.” — Dr. Cheng-Han Chen
Dr. Chen said more studies need to be performed to better understand the dose relationship between niacin supplementation and cardiovascular disease.
“For now, I would caution against routine intake of niacin supplements in the average person,” he continued. “It may be more difficult, however, to avoid niacin-fortified foods given its ubiquity in the food chain; niacin fortification may need to be examined at a higher level as a matter of public policy.”
New research suggests the body’s inability to turn off the stress response is linked to brain cell death in neurodegenerative diseases. Alpgiray Kelem/Getty Images
A new study challenges the concept that protein aggregates in the brain are the direct cause of cell death in neurodegenerative diseases.
The researchers noted the culprit is the body’s inability to turn off the stress response in brain cells.
The findings highlight the potential for using certain drugs to deactivate the brain’s stress response and maintain the activity of a newly identified protein complex, SIFI.
The new insights shift the focus from targeting protein aggregates to managing the stress response mechanism and introduce the potential for new treatment strategies.
Many neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), have been linked to the buildup of protein aggregates in the brain, leading researchers to believe that these protein clumps are responsible for the death of brain cells.
As a result, efforts to find treatments focused on dissolving and eliminating these protein formations have largely been unsuccessful.
But now, new research published in NatureTrusted Source challenges this assumption.
The study authors propose the lethal factor for brain cells is not the protein aggregates themselves but the inability of the body to deactivate the stress response in these cells and maintain the activity of a newly identified protein complex known as SIFI.
Their study demonstrates that administering a drug that can halt this stress response can rescue cells affected by a neurodegenerative condition known as early-onset dementia.
Lead researcher Michael Rapé, PhD, professor and head of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics, Dr. K. Peter Hirth Chair of Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley, said this discovery opens up potential new ways to treat neurodegenerative diseases. He explained that we find clumps of proteins, known as aggregates, inside cells in certain diseases.
Prof. Rapé told Medical News Today the new research highlights how “a set of neurodegenerative diseases are connected through their persistent activation of a stress response pathway (the cellular stress response to mitochondrial import defects).”
“The stress response is normally turned off by a dedicated factor — the first example of ‘stress response silencing’ — and mutations in this factor cause early-onset dementia.”
Normally, cells can turn off their stress response after it’s no longer needed “by diverting the silencing factor (SIFI) from its stress response targets,” Prof. Rapé said.
However, in these diseases, the aggregates prevent the protein complex SIFI from doing its job, which means the cell’s stress response stays active when it shouldn’t.
The research has shown that we can help cells affected by these aggregates, such as those seen in early onset dementia, by using drugs to restore the normal process of turning off the stress response.
These treatments work even without removing the aggregates.
This finding is crucial because it suggests that the real danger from these aggregates is not the aggregates themselves but how they keep the stress response running.
Keeping the stress response constantly active can harm the cells, which might be a key factor in how these diseases progress.
Dr. David Merrill, PhD, board certified adult and geriatric psychiatrist and director of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Pacific Brain Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, not involved in this research, told MNT that this research “represents a promising new way to treat otherwise incurable neurodegenerative diseases.”
“Turning off the stress response in cells that have otherwise lost that capability is a worthwhile approach to study,” Dr. Merrill explained.
Diseases that might benefit from this finding include genetic conditions leading to ataxia, which is characterized by a loss of muscle control, as well as early-onset dementia.
The research also highlights that other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Mohr-Tranebjærg syndrome, childhood ataxia, and Leigh syndrome, exhibit similar overactive stress responses and share symptoms with the early-onset dementia studied.
The research team had previously believed that protein aggregates were directly lethal to neurons, perhaps by damaging internal cell structures.
However, their new insights reveal that these aggregates actually block the shutdown of a stress response that cells initially activate to manage malfunctioning proteins.
The perpetual activation of this stress response is what leads to cell death.
The team suggests that this mechanism could also be relevant to more prevalent diseases that feature widespread protein aggregation, like Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, although further research is necessary to explore the impact of stress signaling in these conditions.
New treatment strategies could eventually involve “compounds that turn off the stress response kinase (HRI),” Prof. Rapé explained.
However, the “best way to treat neurodegenerative disease would be to limit aggregation and silence stress response signaling at the same time, reminiscent of combination therapy now in use in oncology,” the study author added.
Further research is needed, explained Dr. Merrill. “We need robust funding and rapid development of clinical trials targeting mechanisms like the one discovered in this work,” he noted.
“There is still much work to be done, but stress response silencing may prove to be a valuable way to slow or stop [the] progression of some neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr. Merrill concluded.
A study found that the human body has different immune-system responses to keto and vegan diets.
A new study from researchers at the National Institutes of Health in the United States has found significant immune-system responses to ketogenic and vegan diets.
Participants followed both diets for two weeks each. The keto diet was found to prompt responses associated with pathogen-specific immunity developed through regular exposure and vaccines.
The vegan diet elicited responses rooted in innate immunity, the body’s first line of defense against pathogens.
A new studyTrusted Source from researchers at the National Institutes of Health has found significant immune-system responses to ketogenic and vegan diets.
By performing “a multiomics approach including multidimensional flow cytometry, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and metagenomic datasets,” the researchers were able to assess how 20 participants’ bodies responded to two weeks each of the ketogenic and vegan dietary regimes.
The ketogenic diet prompted responses associated with adaptive immunityTrusted Source — pathogen-specific immunity that is developed through regular exposure and vaccines — while the vegan diet elicited responses rooted in innate immunityTrusted Source, which is the body’s first line of defense against pathogens.
There were also significant changes in the microbiomes of the participants, specifically the abundance of the gut bacteria associated with each diet. The ketogenic diets seemed to lead to a reduction in amino acid metabolism within their microbiomes, perhaps as a result of the larger amount of amino acids in that diet.
Each participant was allowed to eat as much as they wanted during the two weeks they were adhering to each diet.
When people were on the vegan diet, which contained about 10% fat and 75% carbohydrates, they consumed fewer calories than their counterparts on the keto diet, which was made of about 76% fat and 10% carbohydrates.
Given the random application of the order of the diets and the diversity of the participants in age, race, gender, ethnicity, and body mass index (BMI), the study’s authors point to how these diets can be consistently applied to the body’s pathways with somewhat predictable results.
“Further exploration of functional trade-offs associated with each diet would be an important line of research,” they write in the study.
Kristin Kirkpatrick, MS, a registered dietician at the Cleveland Clinic Department of Department of Wellness & Preventive Medicine in Ohio and a senior fellow at the Meadows Behavioral Healthcare in Wickenburg, Arizona, told Medical News Today that while these varied diets do show effects on overall health, there is a number of other factors that are at play.
“Both dietary patterns varied in their content of fat, fiber, carbohydrate, and protein composition and each approach had variations of change to immune function,” said Kirkpatrick, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Genetics, and specifically, nutrigenomics may help in determining the correct overall dietary pattern for an individual in addition to factors such as personal, religious, and cultural preferences. There is no one-size-fits-all all approach to diet and even though these two diets may appear to some to have extremes on both ends, there appear to be certain factors of each that are impacting immune function. This was also a small study so larger studies may be warranted to further assess results.”
The ketogenic diet, known as keto, focuses on foods that provide a lot of healthy fats, adequate amounts of protein, and few carbohydrates.
By depleting the body’s sugar reserves and getting more calories from fat than from carbs, the diet works by forcing the body to break down fat for energy. This results in the production of molecules called ketones that the body uses for fuel and can stimulate weight loss.
After undergoing the ketogenic diet, participants in the NIH study were found to have an up-regulation of pathways linked to adaptive immunity, including T cell activation and enrichment of B cells and plasma cells. One of those pathways, oxidative phosphorylation, which is associated with T cell activation and memory formation, was improved after the ketogenic diet compared with the aftereffects of a vegan or baseline diet.
Analysis of participants’ proteomesTrusted Source — the entire set of proteins one organism produces — also indicated that the ketogenic diet may have a bigger impact on protein secretion than a vegan diet, with impacted proteins predicted to originate from several tissues, including the blood, brain, and bone marrow. Both diets affected proteins predicted to originate from the liver and secondary lymphoid organs.
The vegan diet eliminates all animal products, including meat, eggs, and dairy.
It has been associated with weight loss, improved heart health, and a reduction in the risk of chronic diseases such as cancer and type 2 diabetes. It is heavy on fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds.
The study’s authors reported that the vegan diet resulted in a significant up-regulation of the production of red blood cells (erythropoiesis) and heme metabolism. Heme regulates transcription and protein synthesis during erythropoiesis. And the vegan diet resulted in more dietary iron (also important to erythropoiesis) being ingested in the vegan diet than in the ketogenic diet.
Matthew Carter, a doctoral student at the Sonnenberg Lab in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in California (which recently published the resultsTrusted Source of a human dietary intervention trial comparing a high-fiber diet to a high-fermented foods diet), told Medical News Today that the vegan diet raised some questions about how it affected the immune system vs the ketogenic protocols.
“The authors do speculate that part of these differences might be caused by differences in caloric intake (vegans consumed fewer calories),” Carter said. “So it’s a little hard to see if there was something in particular in the vegan diet that caused these changes, or if something about eating less caused these changes. There are some interesting studies on fasting that have also shown changes to the innate and adaptive immune systems.”
Kirkpatrick noted that while the study’s findings support how powerful a role diet plays in immune function and microbiome health, the rigors of these particular diets can be difficult.
“Many of my patients have benefited from both vegan dietary patterns as well as keto dietary patterns,” Kirkpatrick said. “However, I have also seen challenges with both in terms of long-term sustainability. For example, few of my patients can remain strict keto over 6 months, and many transition to a low to moderate carb approach.”
A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe.
When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.
In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.
The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.
This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
Artwork of a Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.
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These are tubes made of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which is its structural network.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.
This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
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Artwork of a Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.
The new study still finds that reducing unprocessed red meat consumption by three servings in a week is associated with an an approximately eight per cent lower lifetime risk of heart disease, cancer and early death.
Another diet study, another controversy and the public is left wondering what to make of it. This time it’s a series of studies in the Annals of Internal Medicineby an international group of researchers concluding people need not reduce their consumption of red and processed meat.
This new study doesn’t dispute the finding of a possible increased risk for heart disease, cancer and early death from eating meat. However, the panel of international nutritional scientists concluded the risk was so small and the studies of too poor quality to justify any recommendation.
So What Does the New Research Actually Say?
The authors conducted a study of studies. This is done when findings of one or two pieces of research may not be definitive. Or the effect of something is so small you need to pool smaller studies into a larger one. From this, the authors found reducing unprocessed red meat consumption by three servings in a week was associated with an approximately eight per cent lower lifetime risk of heart disease, cancer and early death.
These findings are similar to many studies before it and aren’t surprising. However, this is a much smaller change in improved health than would be achieved by stopping smoking, eliminating hypertension or starting physical activity.
Where the authors differed from previous studies was in how they assessed both the research and the benefit of reducing meat consumption to make their recommendations. They used a standard practice in medicine to grade the quality of the studies and found them to be poor. In addition, they interpreted the benefit of unprocessed red meat reduction (approximately eight per cent lower lifetime risk) to be small. They collectively recommended against the need for people to reduce meat consumption.
Nutritional science is messy. Most of our guidelines are based on observational studies in which scientists ask people what, and how much, they have eaten in a given time period (usually the previous year), and then follow them for years to see how many people get a disease or die.
A lot of times, diet is assessed only once, but we know people’s diets change over time. More robust studies ask people to report their diet multiple times. This can take into account changes. However, self-reported dietary data is known to be poor. People may know what they ate, but have trouble knowing how much and even how it was prepared. All of which can affect the nutritional value of a food.
These studies also only identify associations, and not causation. This doesn’t mean causation isn’t possible, just the design of the study cannot show it. Usually, if a number of observational studies show similar results, our confidence of a causal effect increases. But in the end, this is still weak evidence.
Sticking With Diets is Challenging
The gold standard in medical science is the randomized controlled trial in which people are assigned by chance to various different groups, the most familiar being a new drug compared to placebo. Some say we shouldn’t use the same standard in nutrition because it’s hard to do. Sticking to diets is extremely challenging, which makes it hard to conduct a study long enough to see an effect on disease, not to mention the costs involved in doing so.
In addition, nutrition is complex. It’s not like smoking, where the goal is to not smoke at all. We need to eat to live. Therefore when we stop eating one thing, we likely replace it with another. What food we choose as the replacement can be just as important to our overall health as what food was stopped.
There are numerous instances when observational studies have shown a protective effect of a nutrient only to be disproven in randomized trials. Vitamins C, D and E, folic acid and beta carotene supplements were all believed to prevent disease in observational studies. These claims went unproven in randomized studies.
In the case of beta carotene supplementation, for example, an increased risk for lung cancer was found. By not holding nutrition sciences to the same bar as other medical sciences, we may be doing the public more harm than good.
Weak Evidence Leads to Bad Guidelines
From a public health perspective, a small individual change replicated throughout the population can lead to large changes at the societal level. This could result in changes in the average age of disease onset or death rates, which in turn could result in lower health-care costs. And for this reason, guidelines are needed, but if all we have is bad evidence, then we come up with bad guidelines.
Throughout the world, life expectancy has increased remarkably in recent centuries. While there are many reasons for this, advances in nutritional sciences are a key one. This knowledge has led to the elimination of nutritional deficiencies. Most people don’t worry too much about rickets, goiters or scurvy in North America these days.
In the future, however, additional research in nutrition is going to lead to less remarkable gains in quality and length of life, measured in days, not years.
While the war of words among scientists and public health officials continue, the real disservice is to the general public who look to us for leadership. Over time this ongoing inflamed rhetoric begins to turn into white noise, which gets ignored at best, and can diminish the trust in nutrition science.
One may wonder if we should stop nutritional research altogether until we can get it right.
What is the carnivore diet and does it work? Research is limited, but some have seen some health improvements.
Man cooking meat
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While a plant-based diet avoids animal products, a carnivore diet allows its followers to consume only meat and other animal products — a limit, some say, that comes with a host of health benefits.
Philip Ovadia, a Florida-based cardiothoracic surgeon is one of the diet’s avid proponents. Ovadia, who first went low-carb before transitioning to fully carnivore five years ago, credits the lifestyle change for helping him lose weight and increase his energy and mental clarity.
“During the eight years that I have been on various forms of low-carbohydrate diets, I have lost 100 pounds and greatly improved my overall wellbeing,” Ovadia says. “[I] feel better as I approach 50 than I did in my 20s and 30s.”
What Is the Carnivore Diet?
The carnivore diet first became popular around 2018 and is credited to a former orthopedic surgeon, Shawn Baker. It takes the concept of other low-carb meal plans such as the paleo or ketogenic diets and strips out the carbohydrates completely (along with all non-animal protein sources). Similar to the paleo diet, it attempts to replicate food sources available to our early ancestors with an idea that humans were built to eat more like lions and other predators and less like the largely plant-eating primates.
Ovadia says the diet — which may also include spices and seasonings for some — has shown to improve or even reverse a wide range of health conditions from diabetes, auto-immune conditions, and inflammatory bowel disease.
How Does the Carnivore Diet Impact the Body?
Research on the diet, however, is limited. In a 2021 study researchers gathered information on more than 2000 people who had been on a carnivore diet for at least six months. The most notable was the self-reported improvement in diabetes. Of the roughly 400 people affected by diabetes, 74 percent reported that the diet resolved their diabetes completely and another 24 percent reported that it improved their diabetes.
Roughly half of the participants reported being overweight or obese. Among those participants, 52 percent credit the diet for resolving their weight issues entirely while another 41 percent reported some weight loss.
Of the participants roughly 25 percent had mental health issues before starting the diet and reported improvement in psychiatric conditions. Among those participants, nearly all credited the diet change with at least improving their condition if not resolving it entirely.
Lipid abnormalities were the one category in the study with more mixed responses from the participants. Roughly 20 percent of the participants reported having lipid abnormalities before beginning a carnivore diet and while 56 percent of those participants said the diet resolved or improved those issues, the remainder stated that those abnormalities remained unchanged on the diet or got worse.
Is it Bad to go on the Carnivore Diet?
For decades, health professionals have encouraged humans to consume a variety of healthy food from the various food groups. And although dietary guidelines have shifted through the years, eating entirely from just one or two food groups flies in the face of these long-held recommendations.
“I don’t have anything good to say about the carnivore diet,” says Christopher Gardner, director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “There aren’t any carbs there, there isn’t any fiber […] and there’s lots of vitamins and minerals that you get from fruits, grains, beans, nuts, seeds that you wouldn’t be able to get and meet the recommended daily allowance.”
Negative Impacts from the Carnivore Diet
Gardner, who himself follows a plant-based diet, has conducted various diet-related studies over the years. In a recent study, Gardner and his colleagues compared the effects of a healthy vegan diet to a healthy omnivore diet by closely following 22 sets of identical twins over an eight-week period.
In the study, a twin in each set was randomly assigned to either a plant-based diet or an omnivore diet for the eight-week period. A team of health professionals coached the participants on how to exercise and eat healthy in their assigned diets. They also collected various health statistics from body fat, cholesterol levels and even more obscure factors such as libido and aging. The results spoke highly in favor of a plant-based diet.
Over the course of eight weeks, the bad cholesterol levels stayed the same for those following the omnivore diet but decreased an average of 10 percent for those following the vegan diet. The plant-based participants also saw a boost in their beneficial microbiome bacteria and, perhaps even more surprisingly, came out of the eight-week study biologically younger than their omnivore twin. They did this by lengthening their telomeres — protein structures that shorten with age and eventually lead to disease.
What Happens When You Cut Out Everything but Meat?
One of the criticisms often cast on the carnivore diet is the lack of fiber from eating only animal products. Ovadia says that fiber isn’t necessary to prevent constipation and points to a 2012 study to back up that claim.
“People on carnivore diets do tend to move their bowels less often,” Ovadia says. “However this is not accompanied by symptoms of constipation and is likely due to the body better utilizing the food and producing less waste from the digestive process.”
Red meat and especially processed red meat have long been linked to cancer. Ovadia points to a 2019 study which states that the risk is negligible. However, a more recent study highlights a link between red and processed meat consumption to various types of cancer.
Meat consumption can also increase trimethylamine N-oxide, which studies show may raise the risk of heart disease and other ailments
Future Research Is Needed
Gardner says he’s been approached by carnivores about doing a carnivore versus plant-based study. But he says it’s problematic because participants would have to agree to be randomly chosen to follow either diet and typically they have a strong preference for one over the other.
“You can’t be in the study if you just want the one because that means you may be predisposed to something and I can’t generalize that finding,” says Gardner. “I don’t know a lot of people who’d voluntarily be vegan or a carnivore.”
But there is something carnivores and health-conscious vegans can likely agree on. Eliminating added sugars and white flours from the diet can only be an asset for a healthy lifestyle.
“I think one of the main things they’re doing on that carnivore diet is they’re getting rid of all their added sugar and refined grain,” says Gardner. “That is 40 percent of the American diet and getting rid of that has got to do good things for your health.”
Scientists at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology have taken a closer look at the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) and its potential benefits for human health.The study yielded interesting results revealing FMD’s potential not only to improve health markers but also to reduce biological ageing.
The team published their work in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Communications. In this article, we will take a look at the findings.
FMD does not necessitate total abstention from food.
What is the fasting-mimicking diet?
The fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) is designed to replicate the benefits of a traditional fast without the need for complete food abstinence.
Over a five-day period, individuals consume meals high in unsaturated fats and low in calories, proteins, and carbohydrates. Developed by Professor Valter Longo and his team, the FMD is easy to follow and rich in nutrients, making the fasting experience both manageable and beneficial.
The study
The research looked at the impact of the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) across two distinct clinical trial groups, consisting of individuals aged 18 to 70, inclusive of both genders.
Participants assigned to the FMD embarked on 3 to 4 cycles each month, following the diet strictly for 5 consecutive days before resuming their usual eating habits for the remaining 25 days of the month.
The FMD regimen featured a diet rich in plant-based soups, energy bars, drinks, chips, and tea, all portioned to last the 5-day period, complemented by a supplement packed with essential vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. Meanwhile, individuals in the control group adhered to either a standard or Mediterranean diet.
Benefits of the Fasting-Mimicking Diet
Evaluations of blood samples from those on the FMD revealed notable health benefits, such as diminished factors contributing to diabetes risk, including reduced insulin resistance and lower HbA1c levels.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans also indicated a significant reduction in both abdominal and liver fat, signalling a decreased likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, undergoing the FMD was linked to an enhanced lymphoid-to-myeloid ratio, signifying a rejuvenation of the immune system.
Comprehensive statistical analyses from both trials highlighted that individuals adhering to the FMD managed to lower their biological age by an average of 2.5 years, suggesting an improvement in the functionality of their cells and tissues beyond mere changes in chronological age.
Should you consider the Fasting-Mimicking Diet?
The study adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the potential health benefits of fasting and fasting-mimicking diets. It suggests that periodic adherence to the FMD could offer a practical approach to improving health markers associated with ageing and chronic disease risk without the need for permanent lifestyle changes.
However, as with any dietary intervention, it’s important to approach the FMD with a nuanced understanding of its benefits and limitations. While the findings are promising, further research is needed to fully comprehend the long-term impacts and applicability to diverse populations.
Health decisions, especially those related to diet, should be made in consultation with healthcare professionals, taking into account individual health needs and conditions.
Odd cell divisions could help explain why even young, healthy couples might struggle to get pregnant
Human reproduction is notoriously inefficient. Whereas the fertilized eggs of other animals, such as mice, usually progress to more complex embryo stages, fertilized human eggs often falter early on. For a recent study in Genome Medicine, scientists analyzed almost 1,000 embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures to learn why.
Scientists know that chromosomally abnormal human embryos—those with either more or fewer than 46 chromosomes—often don’t implant in the uterus, and if they do, the resulting pregnancy may end in a miscarriage or stillbirth.
Some of these abnormalities originate in the egg or sperm. In other cases, a healthy egg and sperm form an embryo that divides oddly; for example, instead of one cell dividing into two, it might become three. “There is a lot of evidence that during the first cell divisions, human embryos make a lot of mistakes,” says Claudia Spits, who studies related problems of reproduction and genetics at the Free University of Brussels.
The study authors found that these odd divisions lead to new chromosomal abnormalities, which can harm embryonic development even more than abnormalities that originate in the egg or sperm. The new errors can be “catastrophic,” says Johns Hopkins University evolutionary biologist Rajiv McCoy, the study’s lead author. “A lot of times you have three, four, five missing chromosomes.”
McCoy and his colleagues used time-lapse video and a microscope to record the IVF embryos’ first cell divisions. Then they tested for abnormalities among both the surviving embryos and those that failed.
Spits says the effects of postfertilization abnormalities are “something that we have all assumed to be true, but nobody provided the evidence in the manner that [McCoy and his team] have done” by analyzing such a high number of embryos and including discarded ones.
The new study also found that division-related errors are equally common among embryos with eggs from women of all ages, whereas egg and sperm abnormalities increase as people age. The researchers suspect this finding might help explain why it is so hard even for many young, healthy couples to get pregnant. “Maybe some of the mechanisms that we are uncovering from our studies will be relevant to understanding the low level of human fertility,” says study co-author Michael Summers, a reproductive medicine consultant at London Women’s Clinic. The work could also help illuminate what McCoy calls “the black box of early pregnancy loss.”
The scientists say they hope to use their results to improve IVF. For instance, if changing the cells’ environment reduces the likelihood of dividing errors, Summers says, “you could potentially rescue a lot of embryos for IVF purposes because those errors are happening in the dish.”
Certain gut bacteria reside in colorectal tumors, but the species differ depending on a patient’s age, offering hope that our gut tenants could serve as early warning signs of cancer in young people.
Studies of microbes in tumors could potentially help scientists develop new ways of screening for colorectal cancer, some scientists think. (Image credit: PonyWang via Getty Images)
Colorectal cancer most often affects people over age 50, but it’s on the rise in younger people, who are rarely offered screening to catch these cancers early. Now, a new study hints that microbes found in the tumors of younger and older cancer patients differ, and this could potentially offer new means for early diagnosis.
In new research, published Feb. 1 in the journal eBioMedicine, scientists probed the gut microbiome — the community of microbes that populate the lower digestive tract — in cancer patients of two age groups. They included 136 people under age 50 with a median age of 43 and 140 people over 50 with a median age of 73. The researchers found that distinct sets of bacteria were present in tumors of older and younger people with colorectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer is often, but not always, hereditary
“We know that many of these early-onset cancers are not directly linked to a genetic factor,” said Laura Valle, a cancer researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncology, IDIBELL in Spain who was not involved in the new study. Environmental factors, such as alcohol consumption and high-fat, low-fiber diets, are also associated with this cancer, whereas people who eat fiber-rich foods appear less likely to develop it. The foods and drinks people consume are known to affect their gut bacteria, suggesting a link between these factors.
“We have always hypothesized that early-onset colorectal cancers will have something to do with the microbiome,” Valle told Live Science.
To find out which gut bacteria thrive inside the tumors of older and younger people, researchers retrospectively looked at samples of tissue taken from cancer patients, sampling the microbiome directly from tumors and from nearby noncancerous tissue.
In both age groups, tumors harbored a smaller variety of bacterial species than surrounding tissue, and this loss of diversity was more dramatic in the older group. This suggests that only a portion of gut bacteria can survive in a tumor, a low-oxygen environment that’s often inflamed by the immune system.
However, it’s not yet clear what the bacteria do inside the tumors or why certain species thrive there. “This is what exactly needs to be figured out using mechanistic studies,” said lead study author Naseer Sangwan, a microbiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.
Beyond looking at overall changes in microbial diversity, Sangwan and colleagues found certain species that were more often found in tumors of one age group over the other. They also found that different types of colorectal tumors — such as colon carcinomas and rectal tumors — housed distinct bacterial species.
Neither Sangwan nor Valle wanted to speculate about how any given species might affect the growth or spread of a tumor.
“It’s usually not just one bacterium,” Valle said; the community of bacteria in a given tumor should be considered as a whole, not as individual parts. In other words, the microbes interact in complex ways and could collectively influence a tumor’s behavior.
At this point, the study has revealed a correlation between certain gut microbes and colorectal cancer. Although this doesn’t prove that these bacteria cause colorectal cancer, there’s a possibility of a causal link. One hypothesis is that the presence of certain bacterial species or a combination of species could either prevent or promote the cancer.
For example, a broad group of bacteria called Akkermansia, which were more often found in the younger group, were predominantly present in small tumors. This led the scientists to speculate whether these microbes might somehow limit tumor growth. In fact, a mouse study revealed that probiotic treatment — which involved consuming live cultures of Akkermansia — could hinder tumor growth.
Such findings lead some scientists to wonder whether probiotics could control or limit colorectal cancers in human patients. Valle said she’s skeptical, citing evidence that treatments designed to alter the gut microbiome don’t necessarily have lasting effects.
Sangwan, on the other hand, is excited about the prospects for harnessing the microbiome for early cancer diagnosis. The eventual goal is to “accurately predict the occurrence of cancer in young people,” he said.
Early diagnosis of colorectal cancer isn’t usually an option in people under age 45, who have yet to undergo their first colonoscopy. “If you get symptoms from a cancer in the colon, it usually means that it’s quite advanced,” Valle noted. However, lowering the screening age might not be the best solution.
“It’s invasive, and there is a percentage of adverse effects,” such as punctures in the colon, she said. But if we know what bacteria can be found in tumors, it might be possible to detect the microbes in stool samples from young people, she suggested, thus narrowing down who should be screened for signs of cancer.
The study had a small number of participants, so it requires validation in a larger group, Valle said. In addition, many ethnic groups were missing from the study — such as Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander backgrounds — so scientists aren’t certain these results would be similar in patients in these groups.
“We will follow up on this using bigger cohorts of diverse people and ethnicities,” Sangwan said.
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