#375 How Microbes and Bacteria Make You Age Faster - Michael Lustgarten PhD

Michael Lustgarten (0:00)

There's an increased prevalence of not just bacteria, but also fungi and viruses. These microbes have been founded at increased prevalence in Alzheimer's patients compared to age-matched controls who died at the same age.

Siim Land (0:11)

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Michael, welcome back to the show.

Michael Lustgarten (1:04)

Hey, Siim, thanks for having me back.

Siim Land (1:08)

Yeah, like last time we had such a very great talk about many aspects of aging and your experiments and a lot of the fundamentals, but we forgot or we didn't have time to talk about your book, which talks about the microbial burden of aging. So like how the microbiome and gut health contributes to aging, which I think many people haven't really thought about before.

It's definitely like a more, let's say, new concept for many people. So yeah, it's very exciting to have you back and talk about what it is and what can people do to optimize their health and longevity. So we can start, what does it mean, like the microbial burden of aging, that is the title of the book.

Michael Lustgarten (1:51)

Yeah, so I should backtrack. The easy definition is the accumulation of microbes and or microbial products in places that they shouldn't be that accumulate during aging. But I should say I didn't start off in the microbiome space, like my background, my undergrad, my PhD.

It's not in immunology or microbiology. I didn't start off there. But in my metabolomic studies in people, in older and younger adults, I started to see in my publications, I started to see gut bacterial metabolites that were associated with muscle mass and function. So back then, the gut muscle axis, the impact of the gut microbiome on muscle mass, muscle function, et cetera, that really wasn't a thing, you know, 2014, 2013

So the why behind it, the why and how could microbes impact muscle or potentially impact muscle. So that got me thinking.

And as I started to dive deeper into the book, then that expanded from not just the gut microbiome on muscle, but gut kidney, gut brain, I mean, gut everything, right? And not just gut, but then the skin microbiome, which changes during aging, the oral microbiome, which some of that is linked with Alzheimer's. So as I dove deeper and deeper, yeah, it just all came together. And it's funny too, the book I published, you know, a couple of times, 2015, uploaded a new version, 2016, a couple of new versions. So I took a look last night just to refresh my memory, and it holds up pretty well, you know, seven years later. So, yeah.

Siim Land (3:27)

Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of things we can start with, and the microbiome itself is, yeah, like you said, so vast, and there's like microbiome everywhere.

So like, what are the things that, you know, what is the burden about, like what is the things that accumulate, and like what is the negative effect on the longevity? You mentioned Alzheimer's, so like how does microbiome contribute to Alzheimer's or like other age-related diseases?

Michael Lustgarten (3:56)

Yeah, so there's a few factors that are going on. One is a worsened gut barrier function during aging. So stuff that's in your colonic lumen is supposed to stay there, and it's not, or poop it out. It's not supposed to be able to leak into the blood. Now, if some of those things leak into the blood, whether they're microbial DNA or microbes themselves or some of their microbial metabolites, that can trigger an immune activation, immune activation being chronically bad for our systemic health. So that's one way that microbes can adversely affect our health. But in the book, I even took it deeper into all of the hallmarks of aging. At the time, there were nine hallmarks of aging. And it's funny because I remember, you know, Aubrey DeGray was talking about at a conference, you know, fixing X, Y, and Z as components of aging, and that will, you know, improve health span and all these things. And that was when the hallmarks of aging were only nine of them. And I was like, there's no microbial component. How are you ignoring at least 50% of the story? So now that I'm sure you know, it's the hallmarks have been updated to include microbial dysbiosis.