THE BIOME BUZZ
BUGS AND WORMS AND OTHER GREAT STUFF
Category: Macrobiome
Obesity, Metabolic Syndrome and Diabetes: Helminths May Hold the Answers
I found a bunch of new research on helminths and will, over the next month or so, make my way through the papers. I wanted to share first an article just published by researchers in Australia (where some of the best hookworm (Necator americanus)…
Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders: Are Helminths a Solution?
According to the CDC, about 10% of the United States’ population now has diabetes, and 90-95% of those have type 2.[i] That is tens of millions of people in this country alone, let alone world-wide. I need you to be sitting when I tell…
The Promise of Helminths for Multiple Sclerosis
Today I get to write about something other than the bacterial microbiome! Woopa! I was very happy to find a new paper on the possibilities of using helminths (helminth immunotherapy (HIT), as these authors call it) to prevent and alleviate multiple sclerosis (MS).[i] …
Lupus and Helminths: Preventive Promise?
I continue to monitor the macrobiome space, watching as the evidence (very) slowly but surely continues to mount in support of helminths’ ability to alleviate, or even prevent, the development of autoimmune diseases. The latest news is that, in an animal model, Japanese researchers…
Helminths and the Microbiome: An Anti-Inflammatory Partnership
It isn’t often that I find new research on helminths and equally rare to find one on the interactions of the various species of resident in the gut, so I was particularly pleased to find an actual human clinical study looking at how the…
The Deworming Question: A Good Idea? Pointless? Detrimental? The Evidence Mounts…
Last month, a meta-analysis paper came out searching the medical literature through the year 2018, looking for evidence of the benefits promised by the worldwide efforts at deworming school children, recommended by all global advocacy organizations including WHO. The authors, from the Department of…
Helminths and Susceptibility to HIV?????????? A Medical Mystery Waiting to be Solved
A couple of times over the last year, I have described early stage research into the potential of helminths to prevent cancer? File this post under the same heading: the very beginning of a new area of research. Sometimes it just hits me how…
Neurodegnerative and Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Prime Targets for Helminths
Within just a few weeks of each other, two papers have been published looking at the potential of using helminths to treat neurological conditions. Not surprisingly, both focus on the powerful anti-inflammatory effect of helminths. (For those of you new to helminths: these are…
More on Helminths and the Prevention of Cancer
Last October, I wrote about a study that looked at the effects on cancer of the immune modulation afforded by helminths (intestinal worms), which are the main component of the mammalian macrobiome. That paper provided a very positive initial review of the mechanisms by…
Helminth Therapy: A Call to Action
An interesting opinion piece by Dr. William Parker, of Duke University, and colleagues at a couple of Czech Universities, just appeared in Trends in Parasitology.[i] To summarize, the paper makes two key points: A. These scientists hold the belief that the interaction between human…
