Gender - confounder of concern?

Background and clinical characteristics measured at baseline are comparable in the groups of our study. But this doesn't eliminate the need to investigate the impact of confounding. We've already analyzed the effects of age, What about gender as a potential confounder?

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Age and Metabolic Body Odor

MEBO is a complex condition and while some of the cases seem simpler, non-linear analysis approaches are better equipped to handle the task.  And this creates new challenges regarding  the existence of confounding factors.

The Anna Karenina Principle: Sutterella

Sutterella group is the largest cohort identified in our study.

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Concluding the MEBO-uBiome study

We are very close to concluding our clinical trial NCT03582826 ​according to the pre-specified protocol. 

Recruitment for our microbiome study commenced in June 2018 and completed in December 2018. The last batch of raw FASTQ sequences and raw taxonomy-level abundance summaries was received in October 2019. We had to spend more time on collecting and processing annotation data (medical histories, dietary intakes, medications, etc), ensuring quality, completeness, consistency and validity, and defining best approaches of dealing with "missing values".

We have now completed final data collection for the primary and secondary outcome measures.

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The Anna Karenina Principle: Alloprevotella

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", said the great novelist. The Anna Karenina principle (AKP), in the context of metabolic disorders, would mean that an uncompensated deficiency in any one of important enzymes, or presence of any one of pathogenic microorganisms, dooms the person to having the MEBO/PATM symptoms.

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Reducing the stigma of odor disorders

Some conditions - such as obesity, depression and functional odor disorders - come with a social stigma. Understanding the etiology of these conditions helps to avoid stereotypes and find remedies. 

Metabolomics analysis of morning urine samples helped to evaluate the heterogeneity of MEBO population as good as challenge tests, procedures used to induce symptoms and assess resilience to perturbations caused by sugars. 


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The elusive balance: Epulopiscium

Originally published on Aurametrix site

Diseases and conditions caused by microorganisms could be difficult to diagnose. Even in such seemingly simple case as avian flu there could be many different infectious agents causing it, so  new molecular diagnostic techniques are constantly developed and refined. 

We don't have all our test results yet, but have already started analyzing available data. Regression analyses of 153 gut microbiome samples show that MEBO score (a composite score derived from answers to questions pertaining to odor or PATM symptoms) can be explained by combined levels of several dozen microorganisms. Some of them make symptoms worse, while others neutralize the odors or PATM aura.

Here is one example: Epulopiscium

Discovered in the gut of the brown surgeonfish, Epulopiscium actually means “guest at a banquet of fish.” It's a large bacteria  - the size of a hyphen in a printed text, visible to the naked eye. 

Epulopiscium was found in only 5% of general population that tested with uBiome. But we see a much higher percentage of samples with these bacteria in our dataset, depending on the symptoms reported.  

It could be detected in 50% of the sufferers experiencing the worst symptoms, decreasing as symptoms lessen.  The prevalence of this bacteria in sufferers with strong but rarely manifested symptoms  is about the same as in general population, but we never observed these bacteria in those with mild occasional symptoms or no symptoms at all.

Of course, this is not the only responsible microorganism for odors or PATM. We will be reporting more, along with what seem to help in reducing the levels.

We will also tell about bacteria "neutralizing" the odors, found in remission. Some of them are antiinflammatory, others help with digestion. Interestingly, a number of butyric acid-producing microbes also seem to help, even though butyric acid is not supposed to smell pleasant. We'll talk about it next time.