4 ms·

The denial over the role of gut microbiome in producing and modulating neurotransmitters seems like one of the biggest misses in modern science. People are in

by paulmd 3y ago

The denial over the role of gut microbiome in producing and modulating neurotransmitters seems like one of the biggest misses in modern science. People are in sheer and utter denial over the idea that some bacteria in the gut might actually affect what's going on in the brain, but now there are potential links to parkinsons and several other neurological disorders. It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome. You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing. But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries. This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right? People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).

InSteady 3y ago
Yup. Dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine have all been shown to be produced by microbes in the gut, including fungi in some cases. The gut-serotonin angle has been largely ignored because it does not cross the blood brain barrier, but this seems like an oversight due to oversimplification and a myopic view of the vast interconnectedness of the body's various systems. After all, tryptophan does cross the BBB and indeed it must do so in order to supply the body with precursor for endogenous serotonin production in the brain. To say nothing of serotonins many roles outside of the brain that are increasingly being uncovered (all 15 serotonin receptor types are expressed throughout the body, not just the brain). [Above is fairly well established in medical literature, the following is speculative:] Gut microbes may be out-competing "us" for dietary tryptophan, or, alternatively, inflammatory conditions in the GI may trigger the body to send the majority of free tryptophan down the kynurenine pathway, with little left over to make it up to the brain for endogenous neurotransmitter production.
gehwartzen 3y ago
I had a really bad bout of systemic c-diff causing colitis among other symptoms; and at one point I honestly felt like I was on deaths door. This occurred a few weeks after I was on antibiotics for something else. C-Diff is very resistant to antibiotics so if you kill off the other bacteria it outcompetes in ones system very quickly. There have been a ton of articles and studies that show fecal transplants (FMT) from a healthy donor are one of the most effective ways to cure an overgrowth of c-diff. I couldn't get a doctors appointment at a specialist for weeks and was desperate so read the studies and methodologies in detail and did it myself. The key is finding a healthy donor. I decided my 8 you son would be perfect as he is super healthy and generally has the same diet as I do. I won't go into all the details but suffice to say the basics involves a mixer, sample, and enema which you then retain for as long as possible (2+ hours ideally). It was the single most transformative medical treatment I have ever tried. Within a day or two symptoms were down I'd say 80% and within a week I was 100% better (which was confirmed a few weeks later when I finally got an appointment for blood testing and colonoscopy) Not only that I actually felt better than I had in years; consistent brain fog and ADHD symptoms alleviated as did some of my allergies. I was absolutely blown away. I strongly believe this will eventually be viewed as a go to treatment for all kinds of neurological and other pathological diseases. I could imagine donor samples being further refined to increase or decrease specific micro-organisms contained to better target specific illnesses. There are several companies that have developed fecal transplants that are conducted via pill form in which the outside is sterilized in order to get rid of the ick factor. >"It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters)." Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening) [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/

by paulmd 3y ago

InSteady 3y ago

Yup. Dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine have all been shown to be produced by microbes in the gut, including fungi in some cases. The gut-serotonin angle has been largely ignored because it does not cross the blood brain barrier, but this seems like an oversight due to oversimplification and a myopic view of the vast interconnectedness of the body's various systems. After all, tryptophan does cross the BBB and indeed it must do so in order to supply the body with precursor for endogenous serotonin production in the brain. To say nothing of serotonins many roles outside of the brain that are increasingly being uncovered (all 15 serotonin receptor types are expressed throughout the body, not just the brain). [Above is fairly well established in medical literature, the following is speculative:] Gut microbes may be out-competing "us" for dietary tryptophan, or, alternatively, inflammatory conditions in the GI may trigger the body to send the majority of free tryptophan down the kynurenine pathway, with little left over to make it up to the brain for endogenous neurotransmitter production.

gehwartzen 3y ago

I had a really bad bout of systemic c-diff causing colitis among other symptoms; and at one point I honestly felt like I was on deaths door. This occurred a few weeks after I was on antibiotics for something else. C-Diff is very resistant to antibiotics so if you kill off the other bacteria it outcompetes in ones system very quickly. There have been a ton of articles and studies that show fecal transplants (FMT) from a healthy donor are one of the most effective ways to cure an overgrowth of c-diff. I couldn't get a doctors appointment at a specialist for weeks and was desperate so read the studies and methodologies in detail and did it myself. The key is finding a healthy donor. I decided my 8 you son would be perfect as he is super healthy and generally has the same diet as I do. I won't go into all the details but suffice to say the basics involves a mixer, sample, and enema which you then retain for as long as possible (2+ hours ideally). It was the single most transformative medical treatment I have ever tried. Within a day or two symptoms were down I'd say 80% and within a week I was 100% better (which was confirmed a few weeks later when I finally got an appointment for blood testing and colonoscopy) Not only that I actually felt better than I had in years; consistent brain fog and ADHD symptoms alleviated as did some of my allergies. I was absolutely blown away. I strongly believe this will eventually be viewed as a go to treatment for all kinds of neurological and other pathological diseases. I could imagine donor samples being further refined to increase or decrease specific micro-organisms contained to better target specific illnesses. There are several companies that have developed fecal transplants that are conducted via pill form in which the outside is sterilized in order to get rid of the ick factor. >"It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters)." Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening) [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/