Doctors aren't entirely sure why rheumatoid arthritis, a disorder in which the body works to fight the joints, but science is currently paying attention to one possible culprit: the germs that remain in our intestines. Fascinating links have been discovered with gut germs or rheumatoid arthritis, further disorders in which the body's resistance begins to become erratic or destroy its own tissue. They don't understand the causes of rheumatoid arthritis, but many assume that the microbiome, or germs whose residents may be our digestive tracts, may be to blame. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Microbes are especially powerful through the gut, hosting less than half of the resistant secrets of their human body. Since the way and reason is digestion, the digestive factor has to deal with a constant flow of nourishment equivalent germs that can be tracked down and, although harmful, ruined. To prove it, our intestine has generated a global and resistant method and its consequences have reached the stomach. It appears that these gut deposits have the ability to trigger bloating deposits throughout the body, such as in the muscles. This work is a growing attempt by technologists across the universe so that the way to the microbiome - that mass of microbes that reside in the gastrointestinal tract, also significantly influence overall well-being can be understood. The gut has about a million unique types of germs that collectively weigh between 1 and 3 pounds. The weight includes hundreds of millions underground, even beyond the reach of the cells that make up our bodies. A study published in 2013 by Jose Scher, a rheumatologist at New York University, found that people with rheumatoid arthritis were much more likely to have a bacterium known as Prevotella covers in their intestines than people who did not have the disease. In another study published in October, Scher found that people with rheumatoid arthritis, another type of autoimmune joint disease, had significantly lower rates of other types of pancreatic cancer. Over the past few decades, scientists have published a growing collection of signs that several of these microbes could have a significant impact on well-being, along with some chronic, non-infectious disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, along with many others that protect against these diseases. “It's become increasingly clear that these microbes can change the immune system in disorders that don't affect the gut,” says Veena Taneja, an immunologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who observed clear differences in the bacterial populations of mice prone to disease. rheumatoid arthritis. In those most vulnerable to the disorder, a species of bacteria from the Clostridium family dominates. Other breeds thrive in mice, and Clostridium breeds are also rare. “This is frontier material,” says Scher, director of the Microbiome Center for Rheumatology and Autoimmunity at New York University. "This is truly a paradigm shift. By adding the microbiome, we have introduced a new player to sports." Scientists are particularly intrigued by whether these bacteria influence the immune system. The prevalence of numerous autoimmune diseases has recently increased; several microbiome researchers say part of the increase is due to changes within our bacterial ecosystem. The changed daily diet, the explosion of antibiotic use and the decrease in contact with the natural world of plants andof animals, rich in microbes, have combined to alter the germs that bring people home. “Our microbiome has changed dramatically over the last century, and particularly over the last fifty years,” says New York University microbiologist Martin Blaser, who places much of the blame on the prevalent use of antibiotics. "We are losing germs with every generation; they are becoming extinct. These changes have impacts." Blaser highlights his research on a species of bacteria known as Helicobacter pylori (so named because it looks something like a helicopter). He sampled the intestinal bacteria of a group of American children, also discovering that Helicobacter pylori existed in only 6% of them. In contrast, other studies have shown that the breed is not rare in the vast majority of individuals from different regions of the Earth, particularly in developing countries. The decline of Helicobacter pylori from the West, likely associated with the spread of antibiotics as well as improved sanitation, could have health implications: some studies report that the bacteria could reduce the chance of asthma, possibly by limiting the immune reaction of the human body to aerial stimulation. Blaser speculates that asthma is one of the disorders affected by our changing microbiome: Rates in the United States have been rising for three years, and increased more than 28 percent between 2001 and 2011. Kasper says PSA could be a more powerful and reliable approach to altering the immune system. system that corrects the balance of germs. PSA also has an advantage over drugs used for autoimmune diseases, Kasper says: It's subtle. Instead of controlling the immune system – a strategy that has obvious disadvantages for the individual – PSA educates resistant cells to continue patrolling without heading towards benign targets. “This is really a molecule that we've been using for centuries,” Kasper, who recently began working on ways to make PSA addictive for people, told me personally. “We all know our bodies could live with this.” Blaser says H. pylori and other gut microbes are deeply involved in our physiological operations and should not be considered alien. “They are part of who people are,” he says. "These organisms are part of the choreography of development; they have a lot to do with how our immune system grows." In reality, these germs have a strong interest in controlling our body's reaction to intruders. Blaser and many others say that it appears that many of the bacteria that reside in us developed by regulating the immune system to avoid being known - and attacked - as germs; in nature, these creatures train immune cells not to become trigger-happy. A microbiome with all the wrong types of germs, or with the wrong proportion of parasites – a condition called dysbiosis – could replicate this immune system, causing immune cells to attack not just bacteria, but also the human body itself. However, when many scientists are convinced of this connection between the microbiome and arthritis, they have not even defined exactly what specific role bacteria play in triggering the disease. Scher says Prevotella covers can provoke an immune response that then targets joint tissue. Or it could exclude valuable microbes that keep the immune system's assault cells overly competitive [a concept supported by the simple fact that individuals with high levels of Prevotella covers had reduced levels of the germ Bacteroides fragilis, which appears to control the system.