Your bowel movements reveal more than just the contents of last night’s dinner. New research that is both gruesome and dark, suggests your poop can tell experts how likely you are to die in the next month.
A team of medics writing in Science Advances developed the metabolic dysbiosis score (MDS), which uses 13 metabolites – chemicals that microbes produce – to predict mortality over a 30-day period.
The MDS may sound ominous. It may sound downright morbid. But it does offer a more life-affirming purpose. The hope is that one day, it could be used to help those in intensive care, offering a diagnostic tool and enabling doctors to identify patients at greater risk of death.
The human body is home to a vast ecosystem of microbiota (bacteria, viruses, fungi etcetera) that affect not only our health, but our behavior. Indeed, we carry as many as 100 trillion bacterial ...
