What can 3 trillion gut bacteria do to your heart? - Part 1

CPR for Life

World expert cardiologist Dr. Tang of the Cleveland Clinic, takes us into the universe of the gut microbiome and describes the little-known ways that food impacts the heart.

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Dr. Tang: the small molecules that float in our body and we know of course we've got cholesterol and sugar, but there are many other things

Dr. Sagar: I am honored to have with us Dr. W h Wilson Tang, to share just a portion of the knowledge that he has with us. Dr. Tang is a leading researcher and cardiologist practicing at the Cleveland Clinic and the Lerner Research Institute. He studied neural and molecular sciences prior to attending medical school at Harvard, and then did residency training at Stanford and a cardiology fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic with further fellowship there into heart failure and cardiac transplantation.

His research work focuses on finding and understanding the underlying mechanisms that lead to heart disease, and for his significant work, he was awarded the Distinguished Scientist Award from the American College of Cardiology in 2022 . So thank you for coming on today.

Dr. Tang: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Sagar: Before we get into. The real details. This is a very specialized area of research, or at least it seems that way to me, being on the outside. How did you get from just thinking about going to medical school, to finding yourself here doing cardiac transplantation, medicine, and researching poop?

Dr. Tang: Well if you say it that way, it's kind of interesting, but truly it was just like most things is serendipity. I've always long to , be a good doctor and be a good cardiologist. And I was fortunate enough to come here to the Cleveland Clinic where I learned a lot, and I stayed here as staff and specialized in heart failure transplant.

That's my day job. But as we continue to see our patients they are more questions than answers. I think most doctors would recognize that and is really the patients that got us to think about, , or rechallenge what we are doing and what are the things that get them sick and continue to let the disease progress.

And if you think about a heart failure transplant is really the, the common final pathway to, , progressive heart diseases, whatever you've got, coronary disease or valve disease or arrhythmia, or the heart just get weak got hit by a virus or whatnot. And what we have continued to really struggle with is, How the different organs interact with each other in terms of promoting disease.

So I had the fortunate to work with many very brilliant minds both in terms of people working with me , and people that we trained and have explored various different ways. I was I jokingly called a closet nephrologist before. I wanna, I've always liked the physiology of kidney so as most trainees and so, and one of my favorite areas also endocrine.

So what would combine cardiology, endocrine and nephrology? We heart failure. And so what we have is a lot of people who are continually congested, patients with progressive cardiorenal problems. And one of the well known, you know, facts of renal dysfunction is progressive accumulation of uremic toxins.

Dr. Sagar: To translate from science to English. Heart failure is linked to not just the heart and vessels, but hormones and the kidney. Cardio means heart renal means kidney nefro also means kidney. You remove toxins are things that will do harm. If not eliminated by the kidneys. Also you're about to hear the term metabolite and that's just a tiny molecule made in the process of metabolism.

Dr. Tang: And that area actually got us interested early on in look at metabolites that are accumulating in the body that causes problems that lead to cardiovascular disease.