Gut microbiome analysis may help physicians more accurately distinguish whether a patient has precancerous adenomatous polyps, or whether they have developed a more invasive form of colorectal cancer.

It’s estimated that approximately 137,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer by the end of 2014, which will comprise 8.2 percent of all new cancer cases this year.

According to research published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, analyzing gut microbiomes provides a much more accurate assessment compared to analyzing decal occult blood tests and looking at clinical risk factors.

A gut microbiome is essentially the collection of all bacteria present in a person’s gut, which outnumbers all other cells in the body by 10 to one.

Patrick D. Schloss, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues discovered that a specific sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene can help to determine the type of bacteria present in a person’s gut microbiome.

The researchers analyzed stool samples from 90 study participants, including those who were healthy, those with precancerous adenomatous polyps, and those with invasive colorectal cancer. They discovered that the composition of gut microbiomes in each group was significantly different.

“Our data show that gut microbiome analysis has the potential to be a new tool to noninvasively screen for colorectal cancer. We don’t think that this would ever replace other colorectal cancer screening approaches, rather we see it as complementary,” said Schloss in a statement.