The gut microbiota has no correlation to insulin sensitivity with respect to age

Abstract

Obesity is known to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, a condition characterized by high blood glucose level in the bloodstream due to insulin resistance. Previous research has studied how environmental factors, such as the gut microbiota, contribute to the progression of the disease. While studies have shown that specific bacterial phyla are associated with insulin sensitivity, there has been disagreements within the literature on the impact of these bacteria and their differential abundance between healthy and insulin-resistant people when different factors such as race and sex are also considered. In this study, we aim to investigate how the gut microbiota correlate with insulin sensitivity based on age. We examined the effect of insulin sensitivity on the gut microbiota between the young and old populations analyzing a dataset containing information about 441 Colombian adults aged 18-62 developed by de la Cuesta-Zuluaga et al. No significant difference was observed in gut microbial diversity analyses by insulin sensitivity status and age. In addition, the number of differentially abundant taxa was small, suggesting there is likely no correlation between insulin sensitivity and microbial composition of the gut with respect to age. However, more differentially abundant genera were observed in the young population. Our results enable us to have a better understanding of the connection between the gut microbiota and insulin sensitivity showing that there is no drastic changes in the gut microbiota influenced by age and insulin sensitivity status, but this requires further research for validation.