Will you soon be asked to give a specimen to assess your microbiome? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Certain bacteria resident on people’s bodies do confer an increased risk for pancreas cancer, a new study finds. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says assessing this type of risk requires analysis of bacteria resident in and on someone, called a biospecimen.

Nelson: You need a collection of folks that have had a biospecimen collected that enables you to look at what bacteria are there and then you need to have some way to look and see who's got pancreatic cancer, who doesn't and other factors that you know might already predispose the pancreatic cancer. And that's what folks did in the study. They collected 122,000 individuals. 445 only developed pancreatic cancer. When they looked at the bacteria 8 of them were associated with a decreased risk of pancreatic cancer, 13 with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer.            :33

Nelson notes that microbiomes may need to be assessed more than once to capture risk accurately. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.