Understanding Your Microbiome Age

Hey everyone, here today to talk about microbiome age, our proprietary metric that looks into how your microbiome changes with age. So we all know that chronological age doesn't tell the whole story. 2 people can be the exact same age but have very different biology, and we see that pattern when it comes to the microbiome as well. So, as we age, our body undergoes a number of biological changes. And one of the things we see is a tendency towards increased low-grade inflammation, often referred to as inflammaging. And we see this age-related pattern not just in your cells and tissues, but also related to the gut microbiome as well. And when we think about aging in other organs, we might look at cells and tissues, but with microbiome, we're looking at the community of microbes living in the gut and how they're changing. So towards this issue and towards this question, we started asking, can we look at someone's microbiome composition and actually predict the age of the microbiome? So this is what we're showing. 85 years old, 3 years older than their chronological age, which is like, you know, older is always worse here. But here we're still in a gray area. Ideally, we want to have a microbiome age in your 60s when you're 85. And as you get older and older than your current age, it of course gets worse. Um, but what is this data built on? So we built a machine learning— we use a machine learning model with microbiome samples from 18 years old to over 100. Um, and the model looks at patterns in the microbiome that change with age. So each of these metrics, um, are a metric that is found to be associated with age and changes as you age. Um, and we compared them, and they add or subtract to your chronological age up here. And what's important here isn't just, you know, getting that number, like, what does this mean? It's really understanding why, what patterns in your microbiome, what metrics are contributing to that result. In this case, when we look at the gut barrier inflammation section, we see a slight increase in age in a few metrics that are a little bit higher than what we'd expect. However, when we look at beneficial functions, this in this report, again, highly personalized to the report, is what's really contributing to increased age here. Um, IPA is a big factor. Vitamin B2 and a number of other metrics here along beneficial functions are contributing to that increase in age. They look more like the older microbiome than a younger one. Similarly, when we look at disruptive functions, we also see a lot of things contributing here as well. M. smithii, methane projector— producer, is, is one of those big ones that is increasing the number of years on your microbiome age report. Gut resilience here is also low. And so we see that also increasing the age. But you can also have factors that are decreasing. So things like abundance index, low C. diff, low Pseudomonas are all decreasing the age on this report. Presence of Bifidobacterium, you can have in the same category opposite effects. So Bacteroidetes is increasing, Bifidobacterium is decreasing over time. So what we're seeing here is, is patterns. What we don't think of the microbiome age doing is just telling us whether a microbiome is healthy or unhealthy. That's not the goal here. There isn't one perfect microbiome. Everything is, is related to individual metrics. Instead, what we're using is data from across the adult lifespan to ask a different question. How does your microbiome compare with patterns we see in different ages, and what biological features are driving that result? And really, really importantly, microbiome age isn't a prediction of your future health or even current health. The microbiome is dynamic. It can change with diet, medications, illness, stress, and other factors. So the goal isn't just to know what your microbiome age is, it's to understand what's behind it and then influence those metrics. I'm not recording, am I? I am recording. Thanks.