What's the deal with the gut-brain connection?
What's the deal with the gut-brain connection?
Stanford Medicine researchers describe the gut-brain relationship and how it affects conditions from anxiety to long COVID to Parkinson’s.
It affects your mood, your sleep, even your motivation to exercise. There's convincing evidence that it's the starting point for Parkinson's disease and could be responsible for long COVID's cognitive effects. And it sits about 2 feet below your brain.
The gut plays an obvious role in our health by digesting what we eat and extracting nutrients. But there's a growing appreciation among scientists that our digestive systems affect our general well-being in a much broader fashion. One fascinating aspect of the gut's widespread impact on health is its direct influence on and communication with the brain, a conduit known as the gut-brain axis.
Through direct signals from the vagus nerve, connects the brain and the gut, as well as through molecules secreted into the bloodstream from our gut microbes and immune cells that traffic from the gut to the rest of the body, our brains and our digestive tracts are in constant communication. And when that communication goes off the rails, diseases and disorders can result.
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This is crazy:
Much of the gut's influence on the brain seems to be driven by the gut microbiome, the collection of (usually) beneficial bacteria and other microscopic organisms that reside in our digestive tracts. Introducing gut bacteria into germ-free mice has been shown to reduce anxious behaviors in the animals, and fecal transplants from humans with depression into rats ramped up depression and anxiety-like behaviors.
A study led by Thaiss that published in 2022 found that mice's gut microbiomes influence their motivation to exercise. The team found that in a diverse population of mice, those that were more inclined to run on their exercise wheels had different microbiomes than their sedentary brethren. When the researchers performed a microbiome swap via fecal transplant, the animals' exercise enthusiasm also switched. The scientists traced the difference to certain fatty acid metabolitess generated by the microbes in exercise-loving mice; these molecules in turn stimulate nerves in the gut that send signals to the brain to produce dopamine, a brain hormone associated with pleasure.
The spice melange
I haven't seen that one, did her mood change?
I can't remember how it ended but people sharing their poop with each other became a fad (based on real life events) and it was obnoxious and gross, but it did work for her I think.
I'm down. I'll take some poop from a happy extrovert please.
They also all gave themselves dysentery.
That said I have wondered why this treatment never seems to be a thing people actually have done.