LiveWell Clinic

03/12/2026

A single course of some antibiotics affected microbial diversity in the gut more than others, a new study found. And the effects can last for several years.

A recent study published in Nature Medicine indicates that certain antibiotics significantly disrupt gut microbial diversity, with effects persisting for four to eight years post-treatment. Broad-spectrum antibiotics, such as clindamycin and fluoroquinolones, cause the most severe, long-lasting damage by eliminating beneficial bacteria like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium.
Antibiotics like penicillin V, extended-spectrum penicillins and nitrofurantoin were associated with only a few species. Enhanced antibiotics like Augmentin (amoxicillin-clavulanate) also significantly disrupt the gut microbiome for weeks to months after use.

Key Findings on Antibiotic Impact
• Long-Term Effects: While some gut bacteria recover within weeks, significant alterations in microbial composition can last for several years.
• High-Impact Antibiotics: Clindamycin, fluoroquinolones, and flucloxacillin are noted for causing severe, long-lasting disruptions.
• Consequences: Reduced diversity can lead to the growth of opportunistic pathogens like Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterococcus faecium, as well as a higher risk of Clostridium difficile infections.
• Disease Association: The alteration of gut flora from high antibiotic use is associated with chronic inflammation, metabolic issues (like type 2 diabetes), obesity, colon cancer and gastrointestinal infections.

What You Can Do:
If you do have to use antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection, add daily probiotics of variable sources, with a variety of probiotic strains included, and continue this probiotic use for at least another two weeks after finishing antibiotics treatment.

Using individual-level data from the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register and f***l metagenomes of 14,979 individuals in Sweden, the authors examined the association between oral antibiotic use over 8 years and gut microbiome and found evidence that antibiotics can have long-lasting impacts on the gut m...

03/03/2026

AI tools aren’t ready to triage you… yet

People want more control over their own health. Health care is expensive, hard to access, and appointments aren’t always easy to get. There is a lot of promise for AI, and people are already using it for their health: 230 million people ask ChatGPT health questions every week. So if AI tools could reliably help people decide when to seek care, that would be a big deal.

But a new study suggests we’re not there yet.

Researchers published a study last week in Nature Medicine testing ChatGPT Health, a new consumer health AI tool, on a basic but critical task: triage. Given a set of symptoms, could it correctly tell you whether to stay home, schedule a routine appointment, get seen urgently, or go to the ED?

The results were mixed, and concerning at the extremes:

For people who didn’t need a doctor at all, it sent them to one 65% of the time. A waste of time and money.
For routine visits, it correctly recommended seeing a doctor 95% of the time.
For people who needed emergency care, it only recommended the ED about half the time. It handled classic emergencies well, like allergic reactions or stroke, but struggled to recognize how sick someone was about to become, like the early stages of a diabetic complication.
More detailed medical data improved accuracy, but adding irrelevant information confused it. For example, when normal lab results were included alongside a note that a patient was suicidal, ChatGPT got it wrong. That’s obviously deeply concerning.

What this means for you: For straightforward health questions, AI tools can genuinely help and can certainly supplement a visit with a clinician. Add more details for more accuracy, but proceed with caution and certainly do not use it for emergency health issues.

03/01/2026

Comprehensive care for beast health at menopause and with starting perimenopause includes multiple aspects - not just treatment of symptoms and use of hormone therapy - but also addressing the associated metabolic changes and mental wellness needs of women reaching their Wise Woman years.
Treatment should also avoid the cookie-cutter approach, and be rather highly individualized for personal health, genetic and endocrine needs of the woman, as well as weighing risk levels and the preferences and goals of the woman seeking medical help for her ensuing symptoms.
As experienced primary care provider with insight into chronic conditions, weight loss treatments and hormone therapy for women at menopause, I know good results cannot be achieved in a single session or a 15 minutes appointment. Mutual trust and respect, as well as in-depth consideration of the patient characteristics are needed for optimal results. Multiple visits and treatment may be necessary until the treatment choices begin to show noticeable results. While we should give some time to treatments to work and reach their full effects, the need for adjustment or even radical change should be always considered at every new visit.
My professional approach is a shared decision-process with the patient, after obtaining in-depth history and additional data to help complete the picture of the woman working with me on her wellness. Sometimes a longer than typical visit is needed to sift out the real needs and the complex factors influencing health of each patient I see. Even addressing a single health component should be done while considering all other contributing factors - something that many specialists have stopped doing at their visits - mainly due to liability and time constraints experienced in their own practice. Systemic pressures like documentation burdens, and specialized training models that focus on specific organ systems rather than the whole patient have been limiting the value of specialist care for years now in the USA.
Sadly, primary care is among the lowest insurance-reimbursed healthcare specialties, while the greatest burden of providing comprehensive complex care is placed on the shoulders of primary care providers everywhere.
It is thus no wonder that doctors preferring to provide good comprehensive care may choose to use a direct-care, no insurance-billing approach in their private practice, to be able to focus on actual care needs of the patient, not on insurance required paperwork. Sadly this disconnect will become even greater, as insurance carriers have started using the approach of flat-out declining complex visits billed for very good reasons by providers, and automatically downgrading the billing codes to a less complex, less-costly visit for them to pay the provider for doing. Providers now have to fight and waste time on resubmitting legitimate claims to be properly reimburesed for their work.
Don't be surprised if in the future the availability of insurance-billing providers will go down, as providers simply do not get paid for the hours long work hidden behind their shortening times spent face-to-face with you as a patient. We are reaching the point where many providers will seriously consider no longer accepting insurance in their practice as they are getting the other short stick end of care reimbursement that you the patient are getting in your more and more limited coverage of care services.
Practically, a revolution of healthcare coverage in the USA is becoming more and more needed to continue giving people the humane care they need.

03/01/2026

Women who used menopausal hormone therapy did not have an increased risk of death, and some even had longer survival, according to a large Danish cohort study.

Among 876,805 women, those who redeemed a prescription for menopausal hormone therapy had a slightly lower risk of all-cause mortality compared with women without menopausal hormone therapy over a median follow-up of 14.3 years (adjusted HR 0.96, 95% CI 0.93-0.98), Anders Pretzmann Mikkelsen, PhD, of the University Hospital Herlev in Denmark, and colleagues reported in The BMJ.

Large Danish cohort study reassures, with some women appearing to have a survival benefit

01/11/2026

Perfluorooctanoic acid raises fatty liver MASLD risk in teens

Perfluorooctanoic acid, a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, may be linked to a higher risk of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease in teens, according to a study in the journal Environmental Research that found each doubling of PFAS blood levels was associated with 2.7 times the risk of MASLD. "When liver fat starts accumulating in adolescence, it may set the stage for a lifetime of metabolic and liver health challenges," said researcher Lida Chatzi. "If we reduce PFAS exposure early, we may help prevent liver disease later. That's a powerful public health opportunity."

THURSDAY, Jan. 8, 2026 (HealthDay News) — PFAS “forever chemicals” might nearly triple a young person’s risk of developing fatty liver disease, a new study says

11/26/2025

Flu Season Forecast

U.S. flu rates currently are low, but public health experts are bracing for a brutal season following unexpectedly early upticks in severe cases in Japan and the U.K., as well as rising case numbers in other European countries. Additional warning signs include a record 2025 flu season in Australia, where about 11 percent more cases have been reported than in 2024 (the most in the last two decades).

Influenza A and B are the two virus subtypes that primarily infect humans, with two A strains reported last year—H1N1 and H3N2, followed by B viruses later on. In the U.S., more than half of a small number of recently collected and analyzed samples of influenza A H3N2 strains was found to belong to a so-called K subclade, the new variant causing flu surges in many countries.

Current flu vaccines protect against multiple influenza A and B strains, but not the K variant, as the vaccine was developed before the new form emerged. Nonetheless, experts encourage people to get vaccinated because any reduction in the risk of severe flu is better than none. If you are high risk yourself or have vulnerable loved ones, including young babies who cannot get vaccinated until they are 6 months old, get vaccinated to protect yourself and others .

10/28/2025

Good nutrition while in utero and in the first 3 years of life is highly consequential for cardio-metabolic health later in life.

A British study established that early life sugar rationing was tied to less diabetes and hypertension, two important risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Sugar rationing lasted until 1953 in the UK, starting in the WW II period.

Investigators reported that incident diabetes and hypertension jointly mediated 31.1% of the link between sugar rationing and cardiovascular disease, while birth weight contributed only 2.2%, growing evidence that very early life exposures have profound and lasting effects on adult disease.

"The maturation of metabolic and cardiovascular systems during the first 1,000 days shows exceptional plasticity, with their developmental trajectories being markedly responsive to nutritional inputs, endocrine signals, and broader environmental conditions," according to the research team. "Moreover, nutritional interventions in the first 1,000 days was shown to yield greater cost efficiency and long term health benefits than managing non-communicable diseases in adulthood."

Maybe added sugars should be banned in children under 3 years old, to set a better pathway for later life.

Historical rationing may have had cardioprotective effects

10/24/2025

Gut Virome

A vast collection of viruses deep in our digestive system has now been catalogued, revealing how the so-called gut virome constantly changes in response to our diet, environment and age. The researchers focused on bacteriophages—viruses that affect bacteria and make up more than 90 percent of the virome, reports journalist Kate Graham-Shaw. Bacteriophages, or phages, are a mixed bag. Some can kill harmful gut bacteria but others can carry a gene for antibiotic resistance or otherwise strengthen a pathogen.

Why it matters: Exposures to certain drugs and foods can trigger imbalances in the diversity of the gut virome, which in turn can lead to inflammatory bowel disease, age-related diseases or other disorders. Insights into these relationships could aid someday in the development of phage therapies to enlist viruses that can fight unwanted bacteria.

What the experts say: “A key challenge is distinguishing causality from correlation. Each individual’s virome is unique, so we cannot make sweeping statements about the health of an individual by looking at their virome alone,” says microbiologist Evelien Adriaenssens, who was not involved in the new study.

The human gut virome plays a crucial role in the gut and overall health; its diversity and regulatory functions influence bacterial populations, metab…

10/22/2025

Hidden fat can increase stroke and heart attack risks
A study published in Communications Medicine found that visceral and liver fat can increase the risk of stroke and heart attack, even in people with a healthy BMI. The study, which involved MRI data from more than 33,000 adults in Canada and the UK, found that increased visceral and liver fat were associated with thickening of artery walls and the formation of plaques. (Full Story: HealthDay News)

Generally, a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) under 0.90 in men and under 0.85 in women is considered normal and healthy. Anything above that starts increasing the cardiovascular risk and metabolic complications. WHR is considered a better measure of obesity and of health risks than BMI.

Abdominal obesity seen in patients with normal BMI
Two studies in JAMA Network Open showed the cardiometabolic risks associated with abdominal obesity, even among individuals with a normal body mass index. A global study found that 21.7% of adults with normal BMI had abdominal obesity, which was linked to higher rates of hypertension, diabetes and lipid disorders. A separate study using data from the US-based All of Us cohort found that more than a quarter of participants had "anthropomorphic-only obesity," defined by elevated waist measurements without meeting traditional BMI obesity criteria, and that this also was associated with increased risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease (Medscape article below).

Two studies demonstrate that a large proportion of the population has visceral adiposity even at BMIs below the obesity threshold, and their cardiometabolic risk is elevated.

10/17/2025

Though thousands of products claim to “support immunity” or “reduce inflammation,” most lack solid evidence.
The Scientific American reviewed dozens of studies and spoke with researchers to find out whether any supplements demonstrate anti-inflammatory activity not just in laboratory animals and cultured cells but in human trials. Just three compounds, it turns out, have good evidence of effectiveness: omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin and—in certain ailments—vitamin D.

What they looked at: Scientific studies vary in how they’re designed and carried out. They looked for consistent results across several studies that scientists described as large and well designed. Ones that passed muster tended to focus on biomarkers that researchers use to track inflammation in the body. These include C-reactive protein (CRP), a molecule produced by the liver when inflammation is active, and cytokines, which are chemical messengers. For example, omega-3 fatty acids, which have the most compelling evidence behind them, come in two forms, and they signal the production of molecules in the body that block certain cytokines associated with inflammation.

What the experts say: Inflammation involves hundreds of different types of cells and many signaling pathways, says Prakash Nagarkatti, director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Research Excellence in Inflammatory and Autoimmune Diseases at the University of South Carolina. This complexity makes it difficult to prove that any supplement works consistently.

10/15/2025

MetaGraph an open source new search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data (like DNA and RNA) housed in public repositories. It's dubbed "Google for DNA.
Published in the journal Nature in October 2025, the tool addresses the challenge of making the massive volumes of raw sequencing data from public repositories searchable.
Public repositories such as the American Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) contain petabytes of genomic data.

How MetaGraph works:
MetaGraph revolutionizes this process by creating a compressed, indexed representation of biological data. Its key features include:
• Graph-based compression: The tool organizes the raw sequencing data into complex mathematical graphs that link together overlapping DNA fragments. This process dramatically compresses the data, reducing the storage needed by a factor of 300.
• Full-text search: Much like a standard web search engine, MetaGraph allows scientists to search the indexed sequence data directly. Researchers can input a DNA, RNA, or protein sequence and quickly find where it appears across millions of public datasets.
• Scalability: The system is designed to be highly scalable. As the amount of biological data grows, the tool requires minimal additional computing power, making it a sustainable solution for future research.
Applications and benefits

MetaGraph has significant implications for accelerating biomedical research:
• Pathogen research: Scientists can quickly scan biological repositories to track the emergence and spread of pathogens, such as tracking variants of SARS-CoV-2.
• Antibiotic resistance: Researchers can efficiently identify and study antibiotic resistance genes in bacteria across various environments.
• Disease research: The tool can be used to identify genetic indicators of diseases and accelerate research into rare genetic conditions.
• Biodiscovery: As demonstrated by a related tool, this technology can help uncover naturally occurring variants of enzymes, such as those that can degrade plastic.

With tools like MetaGraph scientists can make potentially explosive new discoveries, understand etiology of diseases and develop effective treatments or possible cures using gene therapy. It will be an exciting time to watch science!

Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in Nature, the search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data housed in public repositories. “It’s a huge achievement,” says Rayan Chikhi, a biocomputing researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

10/07/2025

Actually some pretty good advice for cooking safely and very well explained for everyone.

Click the link to learn the 5 Do's and Don'ts in order to avoid food poisoning. Cartoon for something pretty to look at.
https://ipcblog.org/2022/05/11/five-dos-and-donts-to-avoid-food-poisoning/