Can Your Gut Bacteria Determine Your Risk of Breast Cancer?

One of the most striking things is the gut connection too because there's a group of bacteria in the gut when they grow too much that we can actually look for and we can test through a stool test actually. I mean most doctors who are oncologists don't look at stool tests. I mean if you have breast cancer why should I look at your poop? But we know how connected these things are. Even at Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Tara Singh who's the head of the Genomic Personalized Medicine program there is very focused on the microbiome of the gut and how changes in that lead to breast cancer. Right. So tell us about that connection.

Well, you know, so there's this enzyme in the digestive system called beta-glucuronidase and if that enzyme is too high, that can help, that can cause estrogen to.

Get uncoupled, broken down.

Uncoupled, thank you.

Yeah.

And then reabsorbed into the body. So if you have too much of this one enzyme, we know that that ends up leading to higher levels of estrogen in the body. And we know that estrogen is associated with breast cancer, whether it's causing breast cancer or just causing breast cancer to grow. We know that when estrogen levels are high in the body, that can cause more breast cancer. So it's interesting to note that when there's a shift in the microbiome, there is a shift in this one enzyme beta-glucuronidase, and then that can cause that uncoupling, allowing that estrogen as opposed to just getting released and pooped out, it gets reabsorbed into the body, resulting in higher levels of estrogen in the body.

Yeah, basically the liver packages up the estrogen, sends it down into the poop, and it's supposed to just go out. But this bacteria sort of unwraps it from its package, and then it's free and it can get reabsorbed in the body, and then you end up with these chronically high levels. Yes.