Oct 5, 2020
The connection between alcohol
and gut health is established in scientific literature: alcohol is
an inflammatory agent. But as researchers like Vincent Maffei work
to improve the quality of life for HIV patients, every bit of
information of how that inflammation develops makes a difference,
especially in how alcohol and bowel problems connect.
Listeners will learn
- The difference between chronological and biological health and how HIV patients experience increased biological aging,
- The connection between alcohol and G.I. issues, particularly less diverse microbiota, and
- The significance of their findings, specifically the abundance of Prevotella spp., a bacteria that may be a mediator between alcohol and cell senescence.
Vincent J. Maffei is with the
Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology at LSU. As
a graduate student, he became involved in LSU's Comprehensive
Alcohol Research Center (CARC) and studied how dysbiosis
accompanies biological aging. He combined this with studying how
alcohol affects the intestines, and now studies this specifically
with HIV patients. More specifically, he works to find associations
between alcohol use and advancing aging in HIV patients and their
guts.
He explains to listeners about several players in this complex mix
of cause and effect: alcohol and gut health as well as alcohol and
HIV patients. He establishes that any amount of alcohol can be
harmful to someone suffering from HIV. Combine that with an
already-established connection with alcohol and
dysbiosis in the gut, and researchers are faced with a very
real problem to solve for these patients.
He does a careful job explaining
the background to listeners, bringing in other studies more general
to alcohol use and explaining its effect on T-cell senescence,
which basically means they lack the ability to copy
themselves—limiting their ability to fight infection. Senescence is
also a characteristic of biological aging. He explains that the
administration of alcohol breaks down the gut barrier, allowing
microbes to migrate from the lumen of gut into tissue, which causes
inflammation.
He also explains their worthy end goal: to identify some sort of
microbiota intervention to relieve this component of inflammation
in HIV patients, improving their life span and quality of life.
Hopefully their findings will lead to more precise mechanisms that
can be leveraged in therapeutic modality.
For more, see the CARC
website: medschool.lsuhsc.edu/alcoholresearch.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK