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Most of what happens inside your gut never shows up on a standard blood panel. Roseburia is a group of bacteria that live in your colon and churn out butyrate, a short chain fatty acid that feeds your intestinal lining and quiets low grade inflammation. When these bacteria shrink, that quiet protection thins out in ways your routine labs will not catch.
Across many studies, lower Roseburia levels appear again and again in people with ulcerative colitis, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, Parkinson's, depression, and some cancers. This test reads how much of your stool sequences as Roseburia, giving you a window into one of the most consistent signals in microbiome research.
Roseburia is a genus of anaerobic bacteria in the Firmicutes phylum, meaning it thrives in the low oxygen environment of your colon. It typically makes up a few percent of the bacteria in a healthy adult's stool. Its main job, from your body's point of view, is fermenting dietary fiber into short chain fatty acids, especially butyrate.
Butyrate is not a bystander. It is the preferred fuel for the cells lining your colon, supports the tight seal between them, and helps shape immune tone by nudging regulatory T cells (the cells that keep inflammation in check). When Roseburia drops, butyrate output typically drops with it. That is the mechanism behind most of the disease associations that follow.
The clearest clinical signal for Roseburia is in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a group of conditions where the immune system attacks the gut. In a cohort of 214 people, those with ulcerative colitis (UC, chronic inflammation of the colon) had markedly lower Roseburia hominis and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii than healthy controls, and Roseburia levels moved in the opposite direction of disease activity. The worse the flare, the lower the Roseburia.
Reduced Roseburia intestinalis also appears in the intestinal lining of people with IBD associated arthritis, a joint condition that can accompany IBD. A separate 10 year follow up of 90 IBD patients found baseline microbiome patterns, including butyrate producers, helped predict who would need their therapy escalated. What this means for you: if you have IBD, a persistently low Roseburia trend fits a dysbiosis pattern that tracks with worse disease, and it can be a useful companion to inflammatory markers like calprotectin.
Lower Roseburia shows up repeatedly in people with type 2 diabetes and cardiometabolic disease, and systematic reviews consistently describe it as a protective taxon. Roseburia abundance correlates negatively with BMI, waist size, fasting glucose, blood pressure, lipids, and uric acid in observational work. Higher levels tend to travel with better insulin sensitivity.
A randomized trial of 20 adults with obesity found that a Mediterranean diet increased Roseburia while improving how well the body responded to insulin. In a comparative study of 134 people on cardiometabolic medications, polypharmacy overall reduced microbial diversity, but statin use showed a dose dependent positive association with Roseburia specifically. What this means for you: a low Roseburia reading in the context of metabolic labs drifting the wrong way is one more reason to shift toward a fiber rich, Mediterranean style pattern before blood sugar hardens into a diagnosis.
In a cohort of 201 people with varying severity of coronary artery disease (blockages in the arteries that feed the heart), Roseburia sat inside the microbial group whose shifts tracked disease severity and changes in host lipid metabolism. In a study of 753 women with or at risk for HIV, Roseburia hominis and Roseburia inulinivorans were less abundant in those with carotid artery plaque, and the difference tracked with circulating inflammatory markers.
A study of 135 people with acute ischemic stroke (a stroke caused by a clot blocking blood to the brain) found that those with higher Roseburia had milder strokes and better short term recovery. Researchers framed Roseburia as potentially protective through butyrate driven reductions in inflammation. What this means for you: if you are already paying attention to ApoB (a direct count of harmful cholesterol particles) or hs-CRP (a sensitive marker of low grade inflammation), a Roseburia reading adds a gut based angle on the same underlying biology.
In a cohort of 715 people with end stage renal disease (ESRD, kidney failure requiring dialysis), metagenomic sequencing identified Roseburia as part of a microbial signature that tracks disease stage and circulating uremic toxins. A separate 220 person study validated Roseburia species as discriminating markers across chronic kidney disease (CKD) stages. A systematic review concluded that CKD patients have reduced gut diversity, with lower butyrate producers like Roseburia, linked to higher inflammation and worse outcomes.
What this means for you: if you have CKD or are at elevated risk because of diabetes, high blood pressure, or family history, Roseburia trending low alongside rising cystatin C or falling eGFR (both kidney filtration markers) strengthens the case for tighter metabolic control and, where appropriate, specialist input.
In a study of adolescents with depression, Roseburia abundance alone predicted depression status with a sensitivity of 0.89 and a specificity of 0.56, meaning it caught most people with depression but misclassified more healthy controls. An eight genus panel including Roseburia discriminated major depressive disorder with high accuracy in one training cohort. Pooled analyses of Parkinson's disease (a neurodegenerative movement disorder) consistently show Roseburia decreased, though microbiome differences explain only a small share of overall variation.
Roseburia is also reduced in anorexia nervosa, Alzheimer's dementia cohorts, and in children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis years before disease onset. In adolescent depression, partial recovery with sertraline (an SSRI antidepressant) was associated with partial restoration of Roseburia toward healthy levels. What this means for you: these are associations, not proof of cause. But a persistently depleted Roseburia in the context of mood, cognitive, or neurologic symptoms is a signal worth factoring into a broader workup rather than dismissing.
In a 128 person study of gastric cancer, reduced gut Roseburia predicted peritoneal metastasis (cancer spreading to the abdominal lining) with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.70, where an AUC of 1.0 is a perfect test and 0.5 is a coin flip. A 1,142 participant study of colorectal cancer found Roseburia markedly reduced and tied to lower butyrate output. A 166 person study of stage I to III colorectal cancer linked higher gut diversity and multiple specific bacteria to improved disease free survival.
Across 312 advanced melanoma patients on immune checkpoint inhibitors (drugs that unleash your immune system against cancer), Roseburia species were part of a cohort dependent signature associated with better treatment response. What this means for you: these findings do not make Roseburia a cancer screening test, but a depleted reading fits a broader gut pattern that repeatedly shows up in cancer cohorts.
Roseburia is a research and exploratory marker. No clinical guideline has set a standardized cutpoint, and labs report values as a relative abundance, meaning the fraction of your total stool sequences that map to Roseburia. The ranges below come from research cohorts measured by 16S or shotgun sequencing of stool. They are illustrative orientation, not a universal target. Your lab may report numbers differently, and the exact fraction is less informative than your own trend over time.
| Category | What It Suggests |
|---|---|
| Higher relative abundance | Generally aligns with healthy control groups across studies of metabolic, cardiovascular, kidney, and inflammatory disease. |
| Typical range in healthy adults | A few percent of total gut bacteria, based on healthy controls in published studies. |
| Reduced relative abundance | Appears in cohorts with ulcerative colitis, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, Parkinson's, depression, anorexia nervosa, and several cancers. |
| Not detected | Can reflect true low abundance, an unusually low fiber diet, or a recent antibiotic course. Worth repeating before drawing conclusions. |
Compare your Roseburia readings within the same lab, on the same assay, over time. That trend is far more meaningful than any single number set against a generic cutoff.
Gut microbiome readings are noisier than most blood tests. A single stool sample captures one moment in a community that shifts with your diet, sleep, stress, travel, and any recent medication. In a study of healthy adults, four days of calorie and protein restriction significantly altered butyrate producing taxa, and the community largely returned to baseline once normal eating resumed. That is a reminder that a snapshot can mislead.
Build a baseline, then repeat. If you are making meaningful dietary or medication changes, retest in three to six months to see whether the trend is moving. If you are monitoring a stable health pattern, at least annual retesting gives you enough data to distinguish a real trajectory from day to day noise. A single depleted reading is a prompt to retest and investigate, not a diagnosis.
A low Roseburia reading is not a standalone diagnosis. It is a prompt to look at the rest of your picture. Pair it with other markers that reflect related biology: calprotectin for gut inflammation, hs-CRP for systemic inflammation, HbA1c and fasting insulin for metabolic control, cystatin C and eGFR for kidney function. If several of these are drifting in the wrong direction, you have a pattern worth acting on.
Specialist involvement depends on the context. Ongoing gut symptoms alongside low Roseburia warrant a gastroenterologist, especially if calprotectin is elevated. Metabolic markers drifting alongside it may benefit from a preventive cardiologist or metabolic physician. A low Roseburia with no symptoms and otherwise clean labs is best handled with a dietary course correction and a follow up test in a few months, rather than an immediate escalation.
Evidence-backed interventions that affect your Roseburia Species level
Roseburia Species is best interpreted alongside these tests.