Does your microbiome affect your BP control?

Hypertension affects a significant portion of the global population, with estimates suggesting that around 1.13 billion people worldwide have high blood pressure. This World Hypertension Day 2023 is themed around Measuring your blood pressure accurately, controlling it, and living longer. Let's talk about how your GUT can play a role in better control and more effective treatment.

High blood pressure, a term that has become synonymous with our lives today, a problem/medical condition that is getting in our lives by the minute, increases the risk of heart disease worldwide affecting over a billion people.

It is affected by various factors ranging from genetic to environmental, from diet to lifestyle to addictions. In case studies done on the Indian population, one in five adults have high blood pressure and uncontrolled hypertension and are at constant risk of sudden heart attacks.

Medications, consults, hospitals, and lifestyle experts are all available at our disposal at the current time. Still, people don't respond to medications, and here comes our GUT and its microbiome and how it's linked to high blood pressure with various researchers proving that the gut microbiome can regulate blood pressure through several mechanisms, including gut dysbiosis-induced changes in microbiome-associated gene pathways in the host. Correcting this Dysbiosis can help patients who don't respond to medications.

So what's the Relationship

Dr. Pulkit from Lucknow Gastro and Gynae Clinic says that about 70-80% of the body's immune cells are located in the gut. The imbalance of the microbiome can give rise to a multitude of health issues. The GI tract hosts several processes that play a role in hypertension including metabolism, and hormone production, and it has a role in the GUT - Brain axis too.

Hypertension is associated with increased neural sympathetic activity which affects the GUT permeability and it leads to more toxins entering the bloodstream. Dysbiosis-associated breakdown of the gut epithelial barrier can elicit systemic inflammation and disrupt intestinal mechanotransduction. These alterations activate mechanisms that are traditionally associated with blood pressure regulation, such as the renin-angiotensin aldosterone system, the autonomic nervous system, and the immune system.

So how do we connect them?

The role of good bacteria in short-chain acids will help lower blood pressure. Changing your diet can help amp up your microbiome thereby affecting the efficacy of the antihypertensive medication.

The science behind it: Microbiota-derived metabolites are either beneficial (for example, short-chain fatty acids and indole-3-lactic acid) or detrimental (for example, trimethylamine N-oxide), and can activate several downstream signaling pathways via G protein-coupled receptors or through direct immune cell activation.

Flavonoids-rich fruits and vegetables to dark chocolate help control blood pressure and other cardiovascular markers. Eating food that is pre-probiotic rich is linked to better control so what are pre-biotics? Prebiotic foods are rich in fiber from beans, asparagus, onion, and so on. Yogurt too helps deposit good gut bacteria.

Food rich in sugar, fats, and excess red meat can all lead to a poor gut microbiome, reducing further such intake will aid in dysbiosis control.

Can one test our gut microbiome? Doesn't help!

With the ever-increasing medical bills, getting a GUT biome test, or a genetic microbiome testing can help assess the potential risk of dysbiosis and whether it can hinder treatment.

Getting an accurate picture of your gut health helps you learn which foods work for you and which don't. "You're what you eat", a personalized diet plan based on gut biome testing can help doctors predict which drugs will work better based on gut microbiome profile and enhance effective outcomes. New clinical trials, precision microbiome medicine, and computational methods such as Mendelian randomization have the potential to enable leveraging of the microbiome for translational applications to lower blood pressure.