{"id":81,"date":"2017-10-27T10:50:42","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T10:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.4ahealthygut.com\/?p=81"},"modified":"2018-02-26T11:42:12","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T11:42:12","slug":"are-gut-bacteria-the-gatekeepers-of-ill-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.4ahealthygut.com\/are-gut-bacteria-the-gatekeepers-of-ill-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Gut Bacteria the gatekeepers of ill-health"},"content":{"rendered":"
You might be forgiven for thinking that you are the only person living in your body (Neu, 2011).<\/p>\n
However, the truth is that millions upon millions of microorganisms teem with life throughout the human body.<\/p>\n
They are particularly concentrated along the gastrointestinal tract (the human gut that runs from your esophagus down through your stomach and ending at the anus).<\/p>\n
For the past decade, mounting evidence has suggested that these microorganisms are involved in many common diseases.<\/p>\n
Understanding them and how they cause disease (or at least why they change during disease) is a hot topic in science.<\/p>\n
Below is a quick run through of exciting studies that show how the microorganisms (also known as the microbiome or gut flora) are involved in many diseases including depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, autism, Parkinson\u2019s disease, Obesity, Diabetes, Colon cancer, Crohn\u2019s disease, Ulcerative colitis, Rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome).<\/p>\n
However this is just a quick snapshot – and there are many other diseases also known (or unknown!) to be associated with changes to gut flora begging the question – are gut bacteria the gatekeepers of ill-health?<\/p>\n
Almost 1 in 10 people suffer from depression (reference) yet we still know very little about how or why depression occurs. Many theories of depression are outdated.<\/p>\n
The most famous of these being something called the monoamine hypothesis, which argues that patients suffer from a lack of substances called monoamines and increasing these (which all common antidepressants) therefore relieves the depression (Tobe., 2014).<\/p>\n
But what about those patients for which antidepressant doesn’t work? Do they suffer from too few monoamines?<\/p>\n
Clearly, new models of depression are needed and one exciting possibility is the impact of the gut flora.<\/p>\n
In one study\u00a0 35% of patients with depression suffered from a condition called \u201cleaky gut\u201d (Maes et al., 2012).<\/p>\n
This is significantly higher than the general population. This condition means that gut flora can often permeate (go through) the gut wall and cause an inflammatory response in the patient.<\/p>\n
The mechanism by which this would cause depression in the brain is not known – but the association between the two conditions is clear.<\/p>\n
Schizophrenia is a serious and debilitating long-term mental health disorder that also seems to have little with small bugs growing in your gut.<\/p>\n
But mounting evidence suggests that the intestinal \u201cmicrobiota\u201d might play a role in the development of the disease.<\/p>\n
One study by Olszak (Olszack et al., 2012) and collaborators show\u00a0how the \u201cmicrobiota\u201d is involved in the regulation of the immune system (aka the body’s defenses against foreign invaders like bacteria).<\/p>\n
They found that pro-inflammatory molecules called pro-inflammatory cytokines are elevated in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia when compared to the healthy population.<\/p>\n
Despite these exciting results there still hasn\u2019t been a study looking at the makeup of different bugs in the microbiome as has been done in depression, autism and the like.<\/p>\n
One would expect there to be differences, as in 2012 a study showed patients with schizophrenia have higher levels of antibodies against S. Cerevisiae, a component of the microbiome (Severance et al., 2012).<\/p>\n
Humans only make antibodies against foreign invaders when they enter the venous system and come into contact with blood.<\/p>\n
This suggests patients with schizophrenia have a leaky gut, meaning more bacteria escapes the digestive tract into the blood and therefore more antibody is produced in response to this.<\/p>\n
However, further studies are needed to explore the link between gut bacteria and the brain in mental health diseases like schizophrenia.<\/p>\n
So far we have seen how the human gut has been indicated in a number of serious mental health conditions like depression and schizophrenia.<\/p>\n
It is then no surprise that there are a number of links being drawn between anxiety and the microbiome.<\/p>\n
In one tantalizing study, 45 participants took prebiotics (these are molecules that increased the growth of certain microorganisms in the gut) over a 3 week period.<\/p>\n
The participants scored significantly lower on anxiety tests during this period (Schmidt., 2014)<\/p>\n
And so a pattern has emerged in Neuroscience. For each disorder of the brain, slowly the evidence has mounted that the gut microflora plays an important part in its development or regulation.<\/p>\n
At the very least it seems that these disorders are in some way affecting the way the microflora are regulated.<\/p>\n
As such, there is also a link between Autism and microflora. Autism is another developmental brain disorder that results in long-term deficits in the development of an individual.<\/p>\n