Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

Dr Bishara | Unlocking the Secret_ Gut Health and COVID-19 Severity

17 Sept 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:42

Dr. Bishara describes how his curiosity about why some individuals develop severe COVID-19 led him to investigate the gut microbiome. Comparing children to adults, the research team observed that children’s high levels of bifidobacterium may protect them from severe COVID-19, while adults who fared poorly were often deficient in bifidobacterium. This chunk presents the origin of the research question and the preliminary bifidobacterium hypothesis.

Chapters

It started getting me to wonder what's going on with certain individuals where they're at such high risk of developing severity of COVID And this is where we stumbled into looking at the gut, and it was looking at children, comparing children and why they weren't really getting sick to others. And I guess my love of the gut gave me this inkling that the answer might be in the gut. And so this is where we started doing research. And if every, like, every time we would research, something would just fall into our lap. That led us to bifidobacterium as the probable cause for protection in children because they have so much of it, and the probable cause of severity in adults that did poorly with COVID because they're deficient in it.