Is it true that you are what you eat? Well, have some
bacteria then and get happy. Actually it’s much more complex than that. New
research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA) has shown
that depressive symptoms and behaviours in mice were reversed when the mice
were given food containing lactobacillus,
which is a probiotic bacteria found in yogurt that is made with live cultures.
The research was even able to uncover the specific process for how these
probiotics impacted mood. Finding a link that makes such a close connection
between the gut microbiome and mental health is a major step forward in
learning more about depression and how it can be treated.
Depression isn’t just feeling sad
for a while, it’s a very real neurobiological illness. Major depressive
disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7
percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older, in any given year. As many as
one in 33 children and one in eight adolescents have clinical depression.
Depression also puts those who suffer with it at a higher risk for heart
attacks, even if they have no other cardiovascular risk factors. Since
depression can seriously hinder things like a person’s ability to have a
rewarding career and a stable family life, research into treatments and causes
are crucial.
Lead researcher on the study at UVA,
Alban Gaultier, stated, “The big hope for this kind of research is that we
won’t need to bother with complex drugs and side-effects when we can just play
with the microbiome. It would be magical just to change your diet, to change
the bacteria you take, and fix your health – and your mood. It’s a huge problem
and the treatments are not very good, because they come with huge
side-effects.”
So what exactly is the “gut
microbiome?” It’s the living bacteria inside the intestinal tract that is
responsible for, among other things, keeping the body in balance. It’s a
popular target of researchers looking into all kinds of illnesses. Connecting
it to mental illness or other neurological conditions has been difficult. However,
since the mouse model is used in research because of its similarity to humans,
Galtier’s team looked at mice that were subjected to stress since stress can
cause depression. Of course in mice, it was more about observing how they acted
and looking for “depressive like behaviors” and “despair behavior” since there
is obviously no other way to judge mood in animals.
When the gut microbiome composition
was examined in the mice, both before and after a period of stress there was
one major change that stood out. The bacteria lactobacillus was reduced in
correlation to the onset of depressive behaviors in the mice. When the
researchers added lactobacillus cultures back to the food of the depressed
mice, the behaviors stopped and they began to behave as they had before the
stress was induced.
The research at UVA took it a step
further and also investigated how exactly this mechanism of lactobacillus
fluctuation worked. Their study revealed that amounts of Lactobacillus in the
gut will impact levels of a metabolite in the blood called kynurenine which is
known to fuel depression. When lactobacillus went down, kynurenine went up and
the despair behaviors of the mice began. The team hopes that they can translate
these results in humans. Graduate student Ioana Marin, a researcher on the
study said, “There has been some work in humans and quite a bit in animal
models talking about how this metabolite, kynurenine, can influence behavior.
It’s something produced with inflammation that we know is connected with
depression. But the question still remains: How? How does this molecule affect
the brain? What are the processes?” This are the begging questions scientist
are looking answer for.
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