Many months ago, I extracted information from various sources on what end products/metabolites are produced by various bacteria. My reasoning was simple: the symptom may be due to too much OR too little of some metabolite/chemical, like lactic acid. Lactic acid is produced by many different bacteria. If we try looking for patterns with the end products then the specific bacteria become less important, and the combined results of many taxa become apparent.

Over the last weekend, I attend a conference on Autism and the speakers mentioned finding some metabolites too high or too low. I decided to revisit the end product pages and added some new pages. My focus is autism but the approach in this post can be applied on other matters.

The quick summary page

This page just lists the symptoms (like autism, POTS, FM, ME/CFS) and how many metabolites appear to be statistically significant. I should mention that often the pattern is not autism has the lowest values or highest values, but often land in the high medium range — missing high values and low values.

Looking at AGE 60-70, you can see a lot of age related changes! Lower vitamin B12 and butyrate, higher hydrogen sulfide

My original thinking is that by taking select supplements you can bring up (or take down) the levels in the gut. My rationale is simple, end products are used by other bacteria. If you are short on one, it will alter the microbiome balance across many taxa, a cascading effect.

With autism, looking at the numbers above there is a pattern of “not in the middle”. The amounts being produced are too high OR too low often. Some items are in one direction:

• Formic Acid: Too high

We also have finer resolution available which (a surprise to me) often find more items, as shown below.

When we go to finer levels, we actually get more stronger relationships

For Lactic Acid, there are a number that are sky-high. A similar pattern is also seen with a subset of ME/CFS. Trytophan has the values at the highest and lowest 6%. Etc

Bottom Line

Unlike taxa where diet and supplements modifications are obvious steps, a lot of eurekas here may need physicians to know how to proceed. A few items like low production of Vitamin B12 and some amino acids have over the counter supplements available.