11–20 of 35 posts
Always difficult to interpret the effect size of medical studies. Can an expert chime in here? What does this translate to in percentage terms, or number of standard deviations? How can we tell if this is a clinically meaningful delta?
More broadly - why the obsession in medical papers with statistical significance rather than actual, interpretable effect size?
So what should I eat now?
the last time I looked at microbiome stuff, someone at Stanford tried to chop up all the microbes in poop and sequence all the RNA/DNA sequences they could collect from that soup. It amounted to several petabytes of data or something ridiculous. Has anyone come up w/ a better way of analysis?
the last time I looked at microbiome stuff, someone at Stanford tried to chop up all the microbes in poop and sequence all the RNA/DNA sequences they could collect from that soup. It amounted to several petabytes of data or something ridiculous. Has anyone come up w/ a better way of analysis?
In principle it should be possible to produce some sort of one-time high dose oral probiotic that produces results that are in the same ballpark for effect size and duration as FMT. In practice, it doesn't look like anyone is rushing to get that done, and it might turn out to be very expensive to manufacture 100-200+ distinct microbial populations into a probiotic mix. No-one seems to know whether it would take that many, or whether there are a lynchpin few dozen species one could focus on to get an 80/20 outcome. But that sounds like a question that could be answered in the next decade or two at the present pace.
the last time I looked at microbiome stuff, someone at Stanford tried to chop up all the microbes in poop and sequence all the RNA/DNA sequences they could collect from that soup. It amounted to several petabytes of data or something ridiculous. Has anyone come up w/ a better way of analysis?
Viome is one of many companies offering this as a service. Viome isn't so good at giving you the underlying data, some of the others may be better; look at their example reports or ask their support. Ombre, BIOHM, Tiny Health, Floré, etc.
In terms of whether the add-on services they offer are valuable (tailored prebiotics / probiotics / diet advice based on their reading of the literature) I think only time and randomized controlled trials will tell. Not that any of these services have any incentive to run trials! But it may be a useful time-saver for a self-experimenter who would have been digging through the literature to try to come to the same conclusions on things to test.