“at this time, there is no clinical use for direct-to-consumer microbiome tests”, adding that these tests are not reliable or regulated in the same way as FDA-approved lab tests.
With these at home kits, there is often high variability in results, she says. “A person could get two very different results from two separate companies, even if they sent the same sample.”
Identifying the species within the gut microbiome is fairly straightforward, says Dr Justin Sonnenburg, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, but drawing meaningful conclusions from this data is still difficult.
