The Gut Microbiome, a Possible Key to Multidisciplinary Clinical Practice - Literature Review

Modern medicine tends to evolve towards interdiciplinary collaboration and case management. A strong example in that direction is represented by neurogastroenterology, a field that developed arround the concept of gut-brain axis. Still, research in this field determend the multisystemic role of the gut microbiome, beyond it's regulatory function within the gut-brain axis.

The purpose of this review is to focus on the current knowledge in medical literature regarding gut microbiome and its possible invovlvement in medical areas, such as cardiology, rheumatology, pneumology, neurology and psychiatry, bringing these domains closer then ever. We researched Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed and Wiley Library for articles containing the following key words: “microbiota”, “intestinal bacteria”, “disbiosis”, “probiotics”, “prebiotics”, “rheumatology”, “cardiology”, “diabetes”, “metabolic disease”, “clinical medicine” “cardiology”, “cardiovascular”. Articles were selected by number of acceses, citations, results and by being published between 2015 and 2023. Both animal and clinical studies were considered as well as literature reviews and systematic reviews.

Although many studies are still in preclinical phase, and some of them still have uneven results, the road for research has contured theories, especially regarding physiologic and pathophysiologic functions that involve the microbiome and have multisystemic consequences.

Conclusions. The gut microbiome may be the key of understanding multi-organic pathophysiologic mechanisms and may have the potential to act as a preventive clinical instrument and raising the effectiveness of therapeutic management in multiple medical fields, not only in gastroenterology and neuropsychiatry.