Link to a blog of person with UC doing Ubiome test

Just read this blog linked off Ubiome's site. Might be interesting to others who have done these tests? The writer developed UC after a year on antibiotics for Lyme.
autodidactauthor.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/the-gut-following-antibiotics-ubiome-results/

Firmicutes is 88.3%
Bactericide ties is 10.3%
Actiinobacteria is .983%
Proteobacteria is .273%

I had my test done at ubiome. Results are interesting. I know Gary did too and his are similar from what I remember.

I had mine done with UBiome a year ago, here is the basic breakdown. FYI-I was still flaring moderately and was on 4 lialda a day, probiotics and hydro-cortisone enemas every other day (although this sample was taken on a "off" day)

Firmicutes- 56.19%
Bacteroidetes- 35.49%
Actinobacteria- 6.12%
Proteobacteria-2.07%
Cyanobacteria- 0.01%
Verrucomicrobia- 0.01%
Fibrobacteres -0.01%
Chlorobi-< 0.01%

It's also important to realize that it is very possible that the reason the biome is messed up in the first place might be due to the immune system and that the antibiotics only played a small roll. I don't think it is a simple case of the antibiotics wiped out all of these types of bacteria so the cure is simply to just repopulate what's missing. They may be missing in the first place because the antibiotics somehow reprogrammed the immune system to kill off these bacteria and that's why the bacteria are missing, so reintroducing the missing bacteria might have the same result of our immune system's still killing it off.

garylouisville said...
It's also important to realize that it is very possible that the reason the biome is messed up in the first place might be due to the immune system and that the antibiotics only played a small roll. I don't think it is a simple case of the antibiotics wiped out all of these types of bacteria so the cure is simply to just repopulate what's missing. They may be missing in the first place because the antibiotics somehow reprogrammed the immune system to kill off these bacteria and that's why the bacteria are missing, so reintroducing the missing bacteria might have the same result of our immune system's still killing it off.

Certainly not everyone who develops colitis did so because of antibiotics, and not everyone who takes antibiotics gets colitis. But it's looks like this guy's colitis looks to have been at least triggered by the antibiotics and he recovered when he stopped taking them. He says he had a test with another company before he got colitis, so he could compare before and after. He only shows the phylum level from the previous tests but there looks to be a big change.

Maybe antibiotics can cause the biome to go wrong and maybe the immune system can too, or some other cause? So maybe not everyone with colitis has the same cause is what I'm asking?

I think the root cause of true UC (not plain old colitis) is the same in everyone, but there were different triggers which caused the immune system to go haywire. Might be antibiotics in some and any number of other causes in others but that a genetic predisposition caused these triggers to mess up our immune systems.

I've read that the fecal bacteria are not the same as the makeup of bacteria living in the surface of the intestines so trying to get a picture of what your gut biome looks like from stool testing doesn't seem like it'll be all too accurate, imo.
www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-ulcerativecolitis-expert.html

They've identified about 110 possible genes that can contribute to UC, which means that there are so many different possible pathways that can lead to the same intestinal inflammation. Add to that how much microbiota can definitely influence the immune system, and you can get really lost trying to figure out exactly what causes the disease, or what triggers it.

Antibiotics aren't the only thing that contributes to changes in the microbiome, but if you throw in the huge proportion of people with UC who developed it during a course of, or shortly after taking antibiotics, I feel like that's a huge clue to how much gut bacteria can influence the immune system. Maybe even slight changes in ratios could cause UC in genetically susceptible people.

I crash dieted for about a year and a half, cut out many food groups, embarked on a recovery process from my eating disorder, got infectious colitis, and none of that sufficiently altered my microbiome enough to cause UC it seems...but I think one antibiotic course too many set me off because I started having symptoms that never let up during a course of them in February. Meanwhile my bowels were perfectly fine before those antibiotics. I suspect that many things set me up for that to happen, but ultimately the antibiotics were the straw that broke the camel's back in my case.

I wonder if antibiotics themselves affect the immune system directly aside from killing off gut bacteria.

However, I know lots of people didn't get UC while taking antibiotics, and I think everyone with UC probably has something different going on. UC is so complex...any disease except for maybe infectious disease is really complex and we are just now finding out how to assess this complexity.

garylouisville said...
One theory is that antibiotics cause bacteria to mutate trying to avoid the antibiotics and this mutation is not recognized by our immune system so our immune system continuously tries attacking this mutated bacteria but is never able to kill it off so the fight keeps on raging and raging and raging with no end in sight.

I'd never hear that idea before but it sounds really interesting. Has anyone done any published papers on the theory?