Lower your cholesterol, raise your gut resilience: UND researchers discover surprise benefit to a cholesterol-lowering medication

Cholesterol levels are like your golf score: the lower the better.

While common cholesterol-lowering medications can improve your score by lowering your risk of cardiovascular events, a new study published by a research team at UND’s School of Medicine & Health Sciences suggests that these medications might offer a secondary benefit: changes to the gut microbiome that improve resistance to intestinal infections.

“We were able to show that a cholesterol-lowering medication can improve the diversity and richness of the gut microbiome, changes that were associated with improved resistance to enteric infection,” explained Ana Mansouripour, a Ph.D. candidate in the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Department of Biomedical Sciences. “This is a new finding and is very exciting.”

The benefits of improved gut health are many, of course. Not only is a diverse and stable microbiome associated with many aspects of health – it can influence how the body responds to infections, including parasitic infections.

But the role played by widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medications such as bile acid sequestrants, including cholestyramine, in improving gut health, and thus resistance to invading pathogens, was not necessarily clear.

Until now.

According to a paper Mansouripour’s team published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, mice fed a diet containing the cholestyramine were significantly more resistant to the diarrheal illness known as giardiasis than mice fed a regular diet. This is because cholestyramine altered the intestinal bile acid pool, increasing the diversity and richness of the animals’ gut microbiome.

These changes were associated with an increased ability to control the infection caused by a microscopic parasite known as Giardia duodenalis.

“Bile acids are important for the regulation of our intestinal homeostasis,” continued Mansouripour, “and we found that bile acid sequestration medications can increase the diversity of the gut microbiome, which may influence immune responses against different enteric microbial infections.”

The next step, Mansouripour said, is to complete a series of additional studies she’s managing, and graduate.

“We have an ongoing project focusing on bacterial infection in the colon, studying the role of bile acids in regulating colitis,” she said. “This is another chapter of my Ph.D. project that involves the immune response in colitis. Interestingly, we’ve found that the effects of bile acids on host responses to infection in the small intestine can differ from their effects in the colon.”

Although more research is needed, including human trials, Mansouripour added that her hope is to help determine whether certain medications might be repurposed to influence host responses to intestinal infection.

“We’ve proposed studying different approaches – including bile acid receptor agonists or antagonists – to be able to modulate host responses in different types of intestinal diseases,” Mansouripour said. “We’re focusing on animal studies for now, with the long-term goal of determining whether these pathways could provide new therapeutic approaches to intestinal infections.”