Microgenderoma: gender differences at the microbiome level

The gut microbiota is not the same between men and women. You've often heard it said, but just thrown out there. Let's try to understand things simply, but not trivially.

It's not just about marginal differences. For some years now, specific microorganisms have been identified that persist in the female gut until reproductive age thanks to genetic colonization strategies linked to glycan metabolism, with an adaptive advantage as simple as it is “ingenious”: vertical transmission from mother to newborn during childbirth.

Estrogens (and progesterone, it's still not emphasized when the latter is essential) actively modulate the composition of the microbiome: the post-pubertal estrogenic peak determines a significant shift in the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratios that is not observed in males. This is defined as microgenderome.

The real problem? Most clinical trials on probiotics are conducted on mixed or predominantly male populations. Which means that the recommendations one reads around, even from real experts, on doses, strains, and timing, are unfortunately based on data that do not represent half of the population.

And the population with the most gastrointestinal problems and demonstrable dysbiosis development are precisely women. This is why in clinical practice it is often very different from what we see in the literature. It's necessary to study, but it's also necessary to start doing a gender in one's own clinical practice.

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