Unlocking better health with gut microbiome retesting

As clinicians, patients look to us to guide them to better health and wellbeing. While patient feedback can be a good indicator of clinical outcomes, it can be subjective and at times fail to reveal what is happening in their inner ecosystem that we call the gut microbiome. Regular monitoring and retesting of the gut microbiome every three to six months supports personalised care, and accurate clinical decision-making, and enables the evaluation and adaption of patient management.

Retesting allows the detection of asymptomatic gut imbalances

The gut microbiome is always evolving in response to changes in our diet, lifestyle and environment. Some imbalances within the gut, such as functional dysbiosis, may present with no direct symptoms. For example, a patient may report feeling well and have low butyrate, low 3-indolepropionicacid (IPA) and high trimethylamine-producing microbes as well as high mucin degrading microbes. We understand low levels of butyrate may be clinically relevant in some cases as it may be associated with intestinal and systemic inflammation and impaired intestinal barrier integrity. Gut microbiome retesting allows us to confidently understand gut microbiome health and provides analysis and insights into what may otherwise remain unknown.

Evaluate the efficacy of your approach with gut microbiome retesting

Gut microbiome retesting provides an objective reference point, to ensure we are removing the ‘guesswork’ from evaluating patient management strategies. Retesting allows us to see if we have been able to impact gastrointestinal or microbial markers or whether we may need to adjust our approach. Even when we are seemingly achieving clinical outcomes through patient feedback and symptom changes, retesting informs personalised prescriptions by way of prioritisation and adaptation.

Clinical benefits of gut microbiome retesting:

To capture both the subtle and sometimes significant gut microbiome changes, we can benefit from the comprehensive analysis that comes with gut microbiome retesting. The clinical benefits of gut microbiome retesting include:

• Up to date microbiome data
• Personalised patient care
• Efficiently guiding therapeutic changes or modifications to patient management
• Enhancing patient compliance
• Early detection of gut microbiome imbalances for preventative health management
• Reinforcing individual microbiome potential
• Supporting the development of a rich, diverse and robust microbiome – not just free of symptoms
• Influencing prescription dose and duration when combined with diagnostic gastrointestinal testing.  

Patient gut microbiome retesting provides us clinicians with detailed analysis and insights that can alter our clinical decision-making. Incorporating regular gut microbiome retesting into your clinical practice can help strengthen your clinical reasoning and most importantly, optimise patient care.