Hi everyone,
We are increasingly beginning to realize that bacteria play a very large role in our lives. The microbiome is being recognized as a very important contributor to not just our physical health but also our mental health. Bacteria can affect our state of happiness and sorrow. They can lead to depression and schizophrenia. Some mental diseases can even be contagious. Children who are not exposed to vaginal bacteria of their mothers can develop mental problems.
Lots of connection between bacteria and our minds that we are just beginning to find out.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/microbes-can-play-games-mind************
In the ultimate PR turnaround, once-dreaded bacteria are being welcomed as health heroes. People gobble them up in probiotic yogurts, swallow pills packed with billions of bugs and recoil from hand sanitizers. Helping us nurture the microbial gardens in and on our bodies has become big business, judging by grocery store shelves.
These bacteria are possibly working at more than just keeping our bodies healthy: They may be changing our minds. Recent studies have begun turning up tantalizing hints about how the bacteria living in the gut can alter the way the brain works. These findings raise a question with profound implications for mental health: Can we soothe our brains by cultivating our bacteria?
By tinkering with the gut’s bacterial residents, scientists have changed the behavior of lab animals and small numbers of people. Microbial meddling has turned anxious mice bold and shy mice social. Rats inoculated with bacteria from depressed people develop signs of depression themselves. And small studies of people suggest that eating specific kinds of bacteria may change brain activity and ease anxiety. Because gut bacteria can make the very chemicals that brain cells use to communicate, the idea makes a certain amount of sense.
Though preliminary, such results suggest that the right bacteria in your gut could brighten mood and perhaps even combat pernicious mental disorders including anxiety and depression. The wrong microbes, however, might lead in a darker direction.
Microbes have been with us since even before we were humans. Human and bacterial cells evolved together, like a pair of entwined trees, growing and adapting into a (mostly) harmonious ecosystem.
Our microbes (known collectively as the microbiome) are “so innate in who we are,” says gastroenterologist Kirsten Tillisch of UCLA. It’s easy to imagine that “they’re controlling us, or we’re controlling them.” But it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one is in charge. Instead, “it’s a conversation that our bodies are having with our microbiome,” Tillisch says.
Cryan and others are amassing evidence that they hope will lead to “psychobiotics” — bacteria-based drugs made of live organisms that could improve mental health.
Dinan and his colleagues took stool samples from people with depression and put those bacteria (called “melancholic microbes” by Dinan in a 2013 review in Neurogastroenterology and Motility) into rats. The formerly carefree rodents soon began showing signs of depression and anxiety, forgoing a sweet water treat and showing more anxiety in a variety of tests. “Their behavior does quite dramatically change,” Dinan says. Rats that got a microbiome from a person without depression showed no changes in behavior.
Cryan and colleagues have found that the microbiomes of people with depression differ from those of people without depression, raising the possibility that a diseased microbiome could be to blame.
there are hints that introducing just one or several bacterial species can also change the way the brain works. One such example comes from Cryan, Dinan and colleagues. After taking a probiotic pill containing a bacterium called Bifidobacterium longum for a month, 22 healthy men reported feeling less stress than when they took a placebo. The men also had lower levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol while under duress,
If it turns out that bacteria can influence our brains and behaviors, even if just in subtle ways, it doesn’t mean we are passive vessels at the mercy of our gut residents. Our behavior can influence the microbiome right back.
She and her colleagues are testing a relaxation technique called mindfulness-based stress reduction to influence the microbiome. In people with gut pain and discomfort, the meditation-based practice reduced symptoms and changed their brains in clinically interesting ways, according to unpublished work. The researchers suspect that the microbiome was also altered by the meditation. They are testing that hypothesis now.
Giving a name to this complex and diverse consortium could shift scientists’ views of humans in a way that leads to deeper insights. “What we need to do,” Bordenstein says, “is add microbes to the ‘me, myself and I’ concept.”
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Cheers.
Sriram
