Annual Blood Test Might Help Prevent Deaths From Ovarian Cancer

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Dec. 17, 2015 (HealthDay News) — An annual blood test to screen postmenopausal women for ovarian cancer could reduce deaths from this killer by 20 percent, a large British trial suggests.

Currently, with no reliable screening method, most ovarian cancer is diagnosed at an advanced stage, and 60 percent of patients die within five years, the study authors explained.

Using newly developed software to analyze blood test results, the researchers hope routine testing can find cancer early when it’s curable and significantly reduce deaths.

“This is an important step forward in managing a disease that has a very poor prognosis,” said lead researcher Dr. Ian Jacobs, a professor at University College London.

“This is the first time that there has been evidence of a reduction in deaths from ovarian cancer through early detection by screening,” he said. “It opens up the prospect that, in due course, a national screening program for ovarian cancer could become available alongside breast cancer and cervical cancer screening.”

The study findings were published online Dec. 17 in The Lancet.

The trial enrolled more than 200,000 women aged 50 to 74 between 2001 and 2005. The women were randomly selected to have no screening (50 percent of the women); annual screening of a blood marker (CA125) plus ultrasound (25 percent of the study group); or ultrasound alone (the remaining 25 percent). Screening ended in December 2011.

Instead of a being a one-time blood test, this new approach analyzes a woman’s CA125 pattern over time to detect any significant increase.

Over a follow-up of roughly 11 years, 630 women who had no screening were diagnosed with ovarian cancer, as were 338 women screened with the blood test and 314 screened with ultrasound alone.

At first glance, screening appeared to have no significant life-saving effect. But when the researchers excluded women who had undiagnosed ovarian cancer when they entered the study, an average reduction in deaths of 20 percent appeared.

According to Jacobs, 641 women would have to be screened to prevent one death from ovarian cancer.

Robert Smith, senior director of cancer control at the American Cancer Society, said, “With longer follow-up, the reductions in deaths will grow stronger and the numbers to screen to save a life will get smaller.”

Smith said in breast cancer screening, which is deemed effective, nearly 1,400 women need to be screened to save one life.

“If you can prevent one death by screening 1,000 people, that’s responsible public health,” Smith said.

Among women in the study screened with the blood test, about 14 out of 10,000 underwent unnecessary surgery for what turned out to be normal ovaries. In these women, the major complication rate following surgery was 3 percent, the findings showed.

The study authors are optimistic about the findings.

“We knew from our previous studies conducted over a period of 30 years that screening was acceptable to women, that it had a low false-positive rate, achieved a high detection rate and could detect ovarian cancer at an earlier stage. We now have evidence to suggest that it saves lives,” Jacobs said.

Further follow-up will clarify how great the impact is, and perhaps resolve questions regarding the risk-to-benefit ratio and cost-effectiveness of ovarian cancer screening, he said.

“When all of this information is available, decisions about implementing a national screening service can be made,” Jacobs said. “In the meantime, women who are considering whether or not to undergo ovarian cancer screening and the health professionals who advise them will have more information from this report on which to base their decision.”

Rene Verheijen, from the department of gynecological oncology at the UMC Utrecht Cancer Center in the Netherlands, said screening and early detection could prove to be “an alternative to aggressive and expensive treatments that try but fail to improve survival of patients with ovarian cancer.”

However, Verheijen, co-author of an accompanying journal editorial, said more work is needed. “It remains to be seen whether this would mean that screening of all women would yield the same results,” he said.

The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 21,000 U.S. women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2015, and more than 14,000 will die from it.

More information

For more on ovarian cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.

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Banana protein ice cream crunch

 

Post-morning workout feeds have never looked so good.

The cheat: Banana protein ice cream with coconut, almonds and honey drizzle.

The 'grammer: @fitfoodfash

What you’ll need
2 cups low-fat coconut milk (or coconut cream)
2 ripe bananas
2 scoops vanilla protein (we used whey)
1/2 cup plain yoghurt
2 tbsp manuka honey
Cinnamon (optional)

What you’ll do
In a blender, blend coconut milk, bananas, protein, yoghurt, honey and cinnamon if you wish. Mix in 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts (optional). Tip into iceblock trays or a large container and freeze. If using iceblock trays, you can eat straight from frozen. If using an ice cream container, you may need to remove from freezer 10 to 30 minutes before eating so it’s soft enough scoop out. Serve with extra honey and nuts.

The WH&F test kitchen tricked this up with almonds and sultanas. Try mixed dried fruit for a festive twist. Mason jars lend a sense of occasion to Christmas dessert too.

 

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Horror Films Really Can Curdle Your Blood

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Scary movies really are blood-curdling, researchers report.

In medieval times, it was believed that extreme fear could “curdle” — or congeal — blood.

Modern-day researchers decided to scientifically test that theory.

They recruited 24 healthy young adults. Some were assigned to watch a horror movie and then an educational movie a week later, while others watched the same movies in reverse order.

Within 15 minutes before and after each movie, blood samples were taken from the volunteers and analyzed for clotting activity. Viewers were much more likely to have increased levels of a clotting protein called coagulant factor VII after the horror movie than after the educational movie.

However, neither movie had any effect on levels of other clot-forming proteins. That suggests that while fear can trigger blood coagulation, it does not lead to the formation of blood clots, according to the researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The researchers explained that blood coagulation in response to sudden fear could have been an important evolutionary benefit, because it would prepare the body for blood loss during dangerous situations.

The study was published in the Dec. 16 holiday issue of the journal BMJ.

More information

The American Society of Hematology has more about blood.

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Are British Teeth Really Worse Than American Teeth?

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Although British teeth have long been a subject of satire in the United States, a new stereotype-busting study is giving the British a little something to smile about.

Researchers have found evidence that British oral health is actually as good, or even better, than it is in the States.

But Americans may place greater emphasis on getting their teeth straightened, tackling overcrowding, and whitening up a yellowing smile, one U.S. dentist suggested.

“For at least 100 years there has been a popular belief in the U.S. that Americans have far superior teeth to the English,” said study co-author Richard Watt, head of dental public health and a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London in England.

This impression, he noted, has many popular culture reinforcements, ranging from tooth-challenged British characters in the popular TV show “The Simpsons” to the “grotesque smile” of Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” character.

“However, no detailed research has examined if this is actually true or not,” Watt said.

“[And] our results showed that Americans do not have better teeth than the English,” he added. “In fact, they had significantly more missing teeth, and inequalities in oral health were much worse in the U.S. compared to England.”

The study is published in the Dec. 16 issue of BMJ.

Watt and his colleagues compared data from nearly 16,000 Brits and 19,000 Yanks that had been collected by the English Adult Dental Health Survey (ADHS) and the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Overall, American adults were found to have a higher average number of missing teeth than their British counterparts: 7.31 versus 6.97, the study revealed. The difference was most pronounced in people between the ages of 25 and 64 years old. Americans in that age group had lost an average of almost one extra tooth than their English peers, the study showed.

But among those over 65, British seniors had lost an average of 13 teeth, while American seniors were missing just under 12 teeth, on average. And older Brits were more likely to report that poor dental health affected their daily life in terms of experiencing pain, having trouble eating, discouraging smiling, and/or negatively impacting their social life, the researchers said.

The investigation also revealed that better-educated and wealthier Americans tended to be in better overall oral health than their British equivalents. However, the dental status of the poorest and least-educated British appeared to trump that of their American peers, the study showed.

What’s more, compared with England, American oral health appeared to be more broadly unequal across the socioeconomic spectrum, the researchers concluded.

Why these differences exist isn’t completely clear, Watt said.

“It’s difficult to fully explain our results,” said Watt, “but economic inequalities in the States are greater than the U.K.” He also noted that the British National Health Service ensures that the majority of British residents are insured for dental care, whereas many Americans have no dental coverage. Population differences in both sugar consumption and smoking habits may also play a role, Watt added.

Dr. Joseph Banker, a private practice cosmetic dentist in Westfield, N.J., pointed to one aspect of dental care that the British study didn’t assess: aesthetics.

American dental patients, he said, are increasingly interested in addressing appearance: getting their teeth straightened, tackling overcrowding, and whitening up a yellowing smile.

“Prevention is, and should be, the main focus of dentistry,” he acknowledged. “Caring for decaying teeth, missing teeth, and filling teeth. But in the U.S., over the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been a noticeable change in why people go to the dentist, with a shift to looking for care not out of need, but out of want.”

Whether the British public has moved in a similar direction wasn’t addressed in the new study. But Banker suggested that the increased focus on cosmetic dentistry may go some way toward explaining why the global notion of an attractive American smile has been so persistent.

“And it also has benefited American dentistry as a whole,” he said. “Because the desire to have a better smile has meant more contact with dentists. So the younger generation has a reduced fear of the dentist. They’re not as traumatized by the experience. And that is all to the better.”

More information

There’s more on British dental stereotypes at the BBC.

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Are You a Secret Santa or a Grinch? Brain Scans May Tell

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Whether you spend the Christmas season decking the halls and whistling Christmas tunes, or grumbling “bah humbug” at holiday-spirited passers-by may depend largely on a particular network of nerves in your brain, a small study suggests.

Brain scans from the study revealed a neural network that might determine whether or not someone will have the “Christmas spirit,” the researchers said.

Certain areas of the brain were activated when people were shown Christmas-related images, but only if their personal background included Christmas traditions, said senior researcher Bryan Haddock. He is a medical physicist with Rigshospitalet, a hospital affiliated with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The areas of the brain that were activated have also been shown to play a role in spirituality, as well as recognizing and sharing emotions with others, the researchers said.

“This network had a significantly higher activation in a people who celebrate Christmas with positive associations, as opposed to a people who have no Christmas traditions and neutral associations,” the researchers said.

The study was published in the Dec. 17 BMJ.

The research team stumbled onto the notion of a brain-based Christmas spirit while using MRI scans to study migraine, Haddock said.

They noticed that some people appeared to experience specific brain activity when shown Christmas-themed images, he said.

To test whether this effect was real, the researchers recruited 10 people who celebrate Christmas and another 10 who don’t. Participants filled out a questionnaire about their Christmas traditions, feelings associated with Christmas, and their ethnicity.

Each person underwent a functional MRI scan while they viewed 84 images with video goggles, including Christmas-themed images interspersed with images of everyday activities. Each image was displayed for two seconds.

Functional MRI scans measure changes in blood oxygenation and flow that occur in response to nerve activity. These scans can produce maps of the brain that show which parts are working during a particular activity.

Those who celebrate Christmas appeared to have more activity in five specific areas of the brain when looking at Christmas-related images, compared to those who don’t participate in the holiday, the researchers found.

Haddock said it’s entirely possible that similar brain areas would activate if a person who celebrates Hanukkah or Ramadan were shown images from those holidays.

“It’s very possible this is a general holiday network,” he said. “When you see images that remind you of good times with your family, that same network might activate.”

But it’s also possible that the differences in the traditions associated with each holiday might cause different neural responses, Haddock said.

“It’s not unthinkable that a festival where there’s a lot of dancing involved would elicit a different reaction from a festival where there’s a lot of eating,” he said.

Dr. Matthew Lorber is acting director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He said the study shows how life events can train the brain.

“People over the years who celebrate Christmas have so many positive associations with it that when they’re shown a picture of Santa Claus or a Christmas tree, it lights up part of their brain,” Lorber said. “A lot of work that’s done in therapy is trying to remove negative associations and build up positive associations that have built up in much this same way.”

Still, the researchers warned against reading too much into their findings.

“Something as magical and complex as the Christmas spirit and the emotions involved in it cannot be fully explained by, or limited to, these systems that we’ve mapped in the brain,” Haddock said.

More information

To learn more about brain imaging, visit the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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U.S. Ebola Survivors Suffered Lingering Effects

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — People who survive Ebola don’t walk away unscathed, doctors have learned.

Every Ebola survivor treated in the United States has suffered from at least one chronic health issue for months following their release from the hospital, according to a report published Dec. 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

These issues affected joints, muscles, moods and even the senses, as some patients have reported blurry vision and hearing loss, researchers found in a survey of eight Ebola survivors.

“The story is not over in Ebola virus patients once they’re discharged and go home,” said lead researcher Dr. Tim Uyeki, the clinical team lead for the Ebola response mounted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They may suffer from a wide range of illnesses.”

Eleven people wound up being treated for Ebola infection in the United States, and two of them died from the virus, Uyeki said.

Uyeki and his CDC team reached out to eight of the survivors in March, to see how they had fared after being discharged from the hospital. Some had been out for as few as four months, and some for as many as seven months. The ninth Ebola patient still was being treated at the time of the survey, and was not included.

The most common post-Ebola symptoms were joint pain, hair loss and lethargy, with six patients reporting each of these symptoms, the CDC researchers found.

Other symptoms, along with the number of patients who reported them, include:

• Blurriness of vision (5)
• Insomnia (5)
• Depression or anxiety (4)
• Heart palpitations (4)
• Muscle pain (3)
• Unpleasant tingling or burning sensations in the skin (3)
• Shortness of breath (3)
• Inflammation of the eye (2)
• Hearing loss (1)

Eye inflammation — a condition called uveitis — was the most serious post-Ebola symptom. “If untreated, that can lead to permanent vision loss,” Uyeki said.

However, Uyeki said his team doesn’t know if the patients still suffer from these problems, as there’s been no follow-up survey performed.

“Many complaints may be quite common, but the frequency and the duration of symptoms are unknown,” he said. “Some of them may be permanent. For example, there could be permanent vision loss.”

Ebola expert Dr. Lee Norman said he was not surprised that people suffer chronic symptoms after their infection has been cleared, but found the report “very helpful in terms of further defining the variety of symptoms that can persist.”

Neither Uyeki nor Norman could say why Ebola is linked to these longer-term health problems. “The mechanics of why it affects the human body in these ways are nowhere close to being understood,” said Norman, chief medical officer for the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City.

But Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever, meaning that it causes bleeding inside the body, and Norman explained that the symptoms in the report are very similar to those found in patients recovering from another hemorrhagic illness called Dengue fever.

“It wouldn’t surprise me to see some of the same mechanisms of Dengue in Ebola,” Norman said.

These patients are being treated on a symptom-by-symptom basis for their post-Ebola complaints by their regular doctors, Uyeki said.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health is mounting an extensive study in Africa that will provide even more information on the long-term health outlook for Ebola survivors, Norman and Uyeki said.

That survey will come on the heels of the 2014 West Africa outbreak, which was the largest Ebola epidemic in history. As many as 28,640 people were sickened by Ebola in the nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and 11,315 died, according to the CDC. Guinea continues to struggle with a trickle of new cases, but Liberia and Sierra Leone have been declared free of the disease.

“It’s encouraging there’s an intense research effort going on in Africa, where there are a lot of recovering or recovered people,” Norman said.

More information

Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on Ebola.

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Heart Disease Now Kills 1 of Every 3 Americans

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — One-third of deaths in the United States are caused by heart disease, stroke and other heart-related diseases, a report released Wednesday says.

Heart disease and stroke are also the leading causes of death worldwide, the report showed.

In 2013, cardiovascular disease killed 801,000 Americans, the American Heart Association (AHA) report found. These are deaths from stroke and all heart-related conditions, which include heart attacks, heart failure, and valve and artery diseases. Coronary heart disease alone caused 370,000 deaths in the United States that year, the AHA said.

About 795,000 people in the United States had a stroke in 2013. These strokes caused nearly 129,000 deaths. Approximately 750,000 Americans had a heart attack in 2013. Those heart attacks resulted in 116,000 deaths in 2013, the researchers said.

The report also noted significant racial differences. The risk of first-stroke in blacks is nearly twice that of whites, according to the report. The research found that almost half of all black people have some form of heart or stroke-related disease.

The researchers looked at heart disease risk factors, too. They found that despite a 30 percent fall in smoking since 1998, nearly 19 percent of men and 15 percent of women in the United States still smoked in 2014. In that year, about one-third of adults said they didn’t do any physical activity outside of work.

Between 2003-2004 and 2011-2012, the proportion of Americans eating a healthy diet rose from 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent among children and from 0.7 percent to 1.5 percent among adults. Even so, nearly 160 million Americans were overweight or obese (69 percent of adults and 32 percent of children) in 2009-2012, the research revealed.

During that time, about 17 percent of adults (13 million) were obese, according to the AHA’s 2016 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Update.

From 2009-2012, almost half of Americans had total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL or higher. And, one-third (80 million) of Americans had high blood pressure, the report said. Nine percent of Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes and 35 percent have prediabetes, the AHA noted.

Forty-six percent of black women and 45 percent of black men have high blood pressure, according to the report.

The researchers also found that 31 percent of all deaths worldwide are caused by heart or stroke-related disease. Eighty percent of such deaths occurred in low- and middle-income nations. Stroke causes nearly 12 percent of all deaths worldwide, the report noted. Nearly 17 million people had a first stroke in 2010, according to the AHA report.

“We’ve made progress in the fight against cardiovascular disease, but the battle is not won,” said AHA President Dr. Mark Creager, director of the Heart and Vascular Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.

“We need to maintain our vigor and resolve in promoting good cardiovascular health through lifestyle and recognition and treatment of risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and smoking,” he said in an AHA news release.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health explains how to reduce heart risks.

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Humans Are Masters of High-Quality Sleep

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — You may not have noticed, but most mammals need twice as many hours of shuteye each night as you do.

That’s what researchers from Duke University discovered after examining the sleep patterns of hundreds of mammals, including 21 primate species.

And there is a reason for the difference.

“Humans are unique in having shorter, higher quality sleep,” study co-author and anthropologist David Samson said in a news release from the North Carolina-based university.

The research team found that people sleep an average of seven hours a night, while some other primates require as many as 14 to 17 hours a night.

People spend less time in light stages of sleep and more time in the deeper stages of slumber, according to the researchers.

The findings were published Dec. 14 in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology.

Humans’ shorter, more efficient sleep likely developed after they left the trees and started sleeping on the ground near fire and in larger groups, to keep warm and reduce the risk from predators. This enabled humans to get the most sleep in the shortest time possible, Samson explained.

Devoting fewer hours to sleep also left more time for activities, such as learning new skills and social bonding, and deeper sleep helped maintain those skills, improve memory and increase brainpower, Samson added.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has more about sleep.

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‘Designer Cells’ Show Promise Against Psoriasis in Lab Mice

By Amy Norton
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 16, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Scientists say they’ve engineered cells capable of automatically detecting and treating psoriasis flare-ups in lab mice — in an early step toward a “precision” therapy for the chronic skin disease.

Experts said they were “excited” by the findings, reported Dec. 16 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. But they also cautioned that a lot of work lies ahead.

In the United States, more than 5 million people have psoriasis, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The disease arises from an abnormal immune system response that triggers a rapid turnover of skin cells. As a result, people with psoriasis periodically develop thick, scaly patches on the skin that can be itchy or painful.

When psoriasis is milder, skin treatments or UV light therapy can be enough to treat the symptoms. But people with more severe psoriasis often need pills or injection drugs that suppress the immune system.

The goal of the new research was to create “designer” cells that can detect the beginnings of a psoriasis flare-up, treat it, and then “turn off” once the symptoms are contained, explained senior researcher Martin Fussenegger.

His team genetically engineered human kidney cells to spot the “signature” of specific inflammatory proteins that are released into the blood when psoriasis is flaring. The cells then churn out two other anti-inflammatory proteins that are naturally present in the body — known as IL4 and IL10.

When the researchers implanted the cells into mice with a psoriasis-like condition, they found that the therapy quashed new symptom flare-ups and also healed existing scars.

So far, the approach has only been tested in lab mice, stressed Fussenegger, a professor of biotechnology and bioengineering at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland.

“This is a proof-of-concept study,” he said.

Results of animal studies often aren’t replicated in humans. And even if the approach translates perfectly to humans, Fussenegger added, it would probably be another decade before it would be available to patients.

Dr. Doris Day, a dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, agreed that many hurdles remain. But she called the science itself “incredibly creative thinking.”

“If this works out, it would be the closest thing to a cure for psoriasis I’ve ever seen,” Day said.

Others agree. “This study presents an exciting new [treatment] approach,” said Michael Siegel, director of research programs for the National Psoriasis Foundation.

“It’s encouraging to see novel science being harnessed to develop new treatments,” Siegel said. “Many psoriasis patients are not treating their disease, or not treating it to the extent that its severity warrants.”

There are newer, so-called biologic drugs that are more effective against psoriasis than older medications, Siegel said. But even better treatments are “very much in need,” he added.

Biologics — taken by injection or infusion — suppress the immune system, so they raise the risks of serious infections and certain cancers, scientists say.

Plus, Siegel said, “psoriasis is a heterogeneous disease and the same treatments don’t work for everyone, or aren’t accessible to everyone.”

For “designer cells” to become an option, however, a lot of unknowns have to be addressed.

Siegel said the cells would probably have to be taken from a patient’s own body (then genetically engineered), to limit the chances that the immune system would attack them.

“Keeping the cells alive inside the body for a long period would be a challenge,” Siegel said.

The plan, Fussenegger said, is not to infuse “naked” cells that would “float freely” in the blood.

“We’ll need to pack the cells in micro-containers, and the resulting device will be implanted in the body,” he explained. “That way, we’ll have control over the cells, and can take them out or replace them at any point.”

Even if all this pans out, there will still be practical questions about the feasibility and expense, Day said.

For now, she recommended that people with inadequately controlled psoriasis flare-ups talk to their doctor. There are new medications that are the most effective yet for treating psoriasis symptoms, Day said.

Psoriasis is more than a cosmetic concern, she added.

About 30 percent of patients develop painful joint damage and fatigue known as psoriatic arthritis, according to the National Psoriasis Foundation. Prior research has also linked to increased risks of depression and physical ills like diabetes and heart disease — possibly because of chronic inflammation in the body.

More information

The National Psoriasis Foundation has more on psoriasis.

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How Bacteria and Brown Fat Can Spur Weight Loss

Photo: Getty Images

As a human, you’re undoubtedly familiar with white fat: the pillowy kind under the skin that stores calories and excess energy. But there’s another type called brown fat, which burns extra calories, generates heat and may spur weight loss.

It’s not yet clear exactly how some fat browns, but finding out could prove important to weight loss interventions. Animals, including us, develop more brown fat when they’re exposed to cold, and now, a new study published in the journal Cellfinds that gut microbes change when mice are exposed to cold, and that shift is enough to burn fat, develop brown fat and help mice lose weight.

For a month, the researchers put a group of mice in a special climate chamber that gradually grew colder and colder—similar to what happens in some mice’s natural winter habitat. They kept a group of mice in room temperature to act as the control group and collected fecal samples from both throughout the month.

MORE: A Fat-Burning Gene May Help Weight Loss

As the mice got colder, they lost weight—but that stopped after a few days once their bodies adapted. The researchers found that the mice got better at harvesting calories from their food, because their intestines and villi that absorb nutrients in the gut became longer. The cold had created a supercharged gut, one that got more calories from the same amount of food.

Even more surprisingly, their composition of gut bacteria shifted. “We found that the microbiota was dramatically changed after cold exposure,” says senior study author Mirko Trajkovski, professor in the department of cell physiology and metabolism at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

He and his team had a hunch that this bacterial shift was influencing weight loss. So they took microbes from both groups of mice and transplanted them into mice that had been bred without any bacteria at all. The mice who got the “cold” microbes started exhibiting changes like the cold mice had; they developed more brown and beige fat, lost weight and had better insulin sensitivity (which helps them adapt to the cold). They even grew longer intestines than the warm-transplanted mice, just like the cold mice had. “What was amazing is that the transplanted mice with the cold microbiota that had never been exposed to cold before were completely protected against hypothermia,” Trajkovski says. “Microbes alone were sufficient to induce this.”

MORE: Scientists Find A Way To Trigger Fat-Burning Brown Fat

But how? The researchers wanted to see if they could pinpoint the bacterial strain associated with these benefits, and they could: a strain called Akkermansia muciniphila. When mice were exposed to cold, their levels of that bug disappeared. But when the scientists grew Akkermansia in the lab and put it back into the mice, the mice start losing weight again.

This isn’t the first time scientists have found that the Akkermansia bug might play a role in weight loss. A June study of 49 overweight and obese adults found that those who had higher levels of the gut bug had better clinical measures after going on a diet, including a stronger decrease in visceral fat than those with lower Akkermansia levels.

One guess is that lower levels of this bug may make animals absorb more calories from their food—and that this could be playing a role in human obesity. “Perhaps putting it back in in humans could be a novel way of promoting weight loss, by shrinking the gut or decreasing the absorptive surface,” Trajkovski says. “We haven’t done the studies yet.”

Obviously, more research is needed before we see Akkermansia weight loss shakes or brown fat in a bottle. But the new study in mice suggests that a therapeutic approach might one day be possible in humans.

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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