Research in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has found that the gut microbiome may be a regulator of body temperature.
“We performed a series of translational analyses and experiments to determine whether and how variation in gut microbiota explains variation in body temperature in sepsis and in health,” the authors wrote in their study.
“We studied patient temperature trajectories using electronic medical record data. We characterized gut microbiota in hospitalized patients using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing. We modeled sepsis using intraperitoneal lipopolysaccharide in mice and modulated the microbiome using antibiotics, germ-free, and gnotobiotic animals.”
Researchers found that common bacteria from the Firmicutes phylum were strongly associated with fever. The research involved experimentation with a rodent model.
What the study determined: “The gut microbiome is a key modulator of body temperature variation both in health and critical illness, and is thus a major, understudied target for modulating physiologic heterogeneity in sepsis.”
