WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9 (HealthDay News) -- Symbiotic microbes found in the gut can disrupt choline metabolism and contribute to the development of insulin resistance, highlighting the "thin line between gut commensal and pathogen," according to a report published online Aug. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Marc-Emmanuel Dumas, Ph.D., from Imperial College London, U.K., and colleagues studied mice susceptible to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which is associated with insulin resistance. Mice were fed either a high- or low-fat diet, and plasma and urine metabolites were measured by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
The authors found that NAFLD-susceptible mice fed a high-fat diet responded poorly on glucose tolerance tests, compared with control mice, and developed micro- and macrovascular steatosis. Plasma and urine metabolic profiling showed a high level of microbiota-derived metabolites of choline, called methylamines.
"Conversion of choline into methylamines by microbiota in [disease-susceptible mice] on a high-fat diet reduces the bioavailability of choline and mimics the effect of choline-deficient diets, causing NAFLD," the authors conclude. "These data also indicate that gut microbiota may play an active role in the development of insulin resistance."
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