
FRIDAY, Jan. 20, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers believe they have found a link between lower bacterial diversity in the intestine's microbiome and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).Normally, “more than 10,000 species of microorganism live in the human intestine,†noted study co-author Dr. Jung Ok Shim, a professor of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at Korea University College of Medicine in Seoul.To study this, the investigators combined their own dataset with nine other published datasets, involving a total of 576 IBS patients and 487 healthy "control" patients. What did they find? The gut bacteria was less diverse in IBS patients than in healthy people, Shim said. The level of abundance of 21 specific bacterial species also differed between IBS patients...