Your Poop Knows If You’re About to Die

Your poop is ready a pretty good indicator of a variety of health problems. But, imagine a future where poop can be read like tarot cards or the lines on your Palm to determine how much life you’ve got left to live.

Turning your poop into a crystal ball is not so fantastical. At least not to doctors at the University of Chicago and the University of Amsterdam, who published their research in Science Advances.

Led by Alexander de Porto, the research teams have developed one such poop crystal ball. They’re calling it the Metabolic Dysbiosis Score, or MDS. It analyzes your fecal metabolites to predict, with startling accuracy, your odds of dying in the next 30 days if you’re critically ill.

MDS looks at 13 specific metabolites in the gut and measures the level of microbial imbalance, or dysbiosis. When your gut microbiome is out of whack, like severely out of whack, it could be a sign that your body is less likely to survive a serious illness.

In a study of 196 ICU patients suffering from respiratory failure or shock, the MDS showed 84 percent accuracy in predicting mortality.

Your Poop Could Soon Be Used to Tell If You’re About to Die

A healthy gut microbiome could explain why, for instance, some people live well into their hundreds. Low gut microbiome diversity has been linked to poor health outcomes, but what’s weird is that this study didn’t find that correlation.

Instead, found that the imbalance in microbial metabolites is the telltale sign that your time is up. It’s a fine but important distinction. It’s a reminder that having a diverse set of gut bacteria is less important than having them all working in step with one another.

Now, before hospitals start rolling out poop tests, there’s a catch: sample sizes were way too small, so any observed trends can’t be viewed as statistically significant. We need more studies, bigger studies, and a lot more poop—poop study time that will be quickly put to good use a variety of ways.

For instance, fecal metabolites have also been used to flag liver transplant patients at risk of post-op infection. Poop, it turns out, is a versatile diagnostic tool that we just flushed down the toilet every day.