What is stability?
Stability is a characteristic of your gut microbiome composition that refers to the amount of change in the microorganisms present in your gut in between your Injoy stool sample collections. The gut microbiome is a dynamic system that fluctuates constantly, but assessing the degree of variation between sampling periods can provide insight into gut health. Both short- and long-term stability of the gut microbiome are an indicator of your gut and overall health. This makes gut microbiome stability a key indicator to have in your Injoy microbiome report.
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How does stability affect health?
Since the gut microbiome is so dynamic, fluctuations in bacterial composition are normal, but they can shift between healthy and unhealthy states. The degree of stability can be quite different between people since many things can contribute to fluctuations in the gut microbiome such as lifestyle factors, antibiotic usage, and existing composition of the microbiome. However, in general, a healthy microbiome won’t experience as much variation over time as an unhealthy microbiome. Long-term instability of the gut microbiome has been linked to low bacterial diversity and several disease states such as diabetes and metabolic liver disease. This suggests that stability is not only important to microbiome health, but also overall health and disease prevention.
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