A weak gut microbiome may be linked to more severe COVID-19 - Business Insider Australia

In a review published in mBio this week, Korean microbiologist Heenam Stanley Kim proposed a hypothesis linking gut dysfunction and severe COVID-19 infection.

While the link has not been specifically investigated, some small-scalestudies have found that patients with COVID-19 have less diverse bacteria in their guts compared to healthy people.

A close look at faecal samples from 15 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Hong Kong found an increase in harmful bacteria and a decrease in friendly microbes compared to healthy gut ecosystems.

More research is needed to explore this potential connection, but it’s possible that gastrointestinal problems such as “leaky gut” syndrome may allow the coronavirus entry into cells in the digestive tract.

Some of the people most vulnerable to coronavirus complications — the elderly and people with chronic medical conditions — are more likely to have altered gut microbiota, with fewer varieties of beneficial bacteria.

Gastrointestinal symptoms have been linked to COVID-19 since early in the pandemic, with initial reports suggesting they afflict about one in ten patients.

Diarrhoea could even be a sign of more severe COVID-19 infection, according to an August 2020 study out of the University of Southern California.

In a dataset of nearly 56,000 COVID-19 patients, every patient who experienced diarrhoea as an early symptom eventually came down with pneumonia or respiratory failure.

A study of symptomatic COVID-19 patients in Singapore found the virus in about half of the patients’ poop, but only half of those patients — roughly 25% of those studied — had gastrointestinal symptoms.

More research is needed on COVID-19 and the GI tract, but we already know that certain illnesses can be treated via the microbiome with a faecal microbiota transfer (FMT), or poop transplant.

Conventional probiotics today wouldn’t be helpful for treating COVID-19, Kim clarified — we would need to develop a very specific type of bacteria to use, so don’t expect to see them available anytime soon.