Microbiome alterations in IBS

We commend the editors of Gut for publishing the article by Hugerth et al 1 given that negative results are conspicuously missing from the microbiome literature. The paper reports that in a randomly recruited Swedish cohort of individuals meeting Rome IV criteria for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there was marked heterogeneity of the gut microbiota, but no distinct ‘signature’ was evident. However, some qualifying caveats for future research are worth highlighting. First, while the overall pool of study subjects was drawn from a large population of volunteers, the actual numbers studied by Hugerth et al 1 with respect to IBS were modest: 63 sigmoid biopsy samples from confirmed IBS cases, and 32 …