This article appeared in the November 2020 issue ofEvery muscle fiber in Tom Peters’ body seemed to be conspiring to keep him in bed. His depression — an occasional visitor for more than a decade — had reemerged in the summer of 2019, and his legs and arms felt like concrete. The thought of spending another 12-hour day at his computer filled him with dread. As a technical day trader for stocks, he responded to demanding clients constantly.
For decades, experts scoffed at the idea that gut bacteria affect our mental health. Many called it a fringe theory. Yet mounting evidence suggests that intestinal microbes profoundly shape our thinking and behavior. Human trials are now underway to investigate how these microbes boost our overall well-being. If the results hold up, new bacteria-based therapies could expand a mental health treatment landscape that has been mostly stagnant for decades.
Fast-forward a century, and data from speedy genome sequencing of gut bacteria in the 2000s revealed that microbes perform an array of bodily tasks. Further studies showed how some might affect mental health. Each of us, it turns out, is more microbe than human: Bacterial cells outnumber human cells in the body by a factor of at least 1.3 to 1.
Years earlier, when Peters’ old dose of Prozac wasn’t working as well, his psychiatrist had prescribed him a new, higher dose, one that brought on annoying side effects. “On the higher dose, I felt like I was more sluggish,” Peters says. “It drove me crazy.” The memory of that unrelenting brain fog helped persuade him to give probiotics a try.In the mid- to late 2000s, John Cryan of Ireland’s University College Cork was among the first to explore gut microbes’ effects on the brain.
Rather than passing from the gut to the brain via bloodstream, some of these chemicals affect the brain through intermediate channels, says University of Pittsburgh clinical research psychologist Lauren Bylsma. A major one, the vagus nerve, functions like a communication superhighway between the brain, gut and other organ systems in the human body. Recently discovered neuropod cells can activate or deactivate the vagus nerve, which interfaces with neurons in the brain.
, their gut bacteria started making more tryptophan. Treated mice also produced more of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor , which helps new neurons grow.
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