Article on connection of the microbiome and brain diseases

[Countrygirl]

http://www.livescience.com/49373-google-hangout-on-brain-and-microbiome.html

Tracy, you've talked about the close connection between a mother's vaginal microbiome, which a baby encounters as it passes through the birth canal, and her newborn baby's. Can you expand on how this natural form of inoculation helps lay the foundation for brain development?

T.B.: There are key developmental windows when the brain is more vulnerable because it's setting itself up to respond to the world around it. At the same time, as Sarkis pointed out, the gut microbiome is helping to prepare the baby's immune system. So, if mom's microbial ecosystem changes – due to infection, stress or diet, for example – her newborn's gut microbiome will change too, and that can have a lifetime effect. It could alter how the gut, and the immune system within the gut, develops and how the brain develops.

What's interesting, from our experiments on the effects of exposure to early maternal stress in mice, is that if you look at those babies in adulthood, their microbiome may be completely normalized, but if you then stress them or give them an immune challenge, you see big differences again in the way their bodies respond. So even acute exposure to prenatal stress seems to alter how an organism responds to changes in its environment in the long term.

here are other anecdotal reasons to believe that neurodegeneration may have some connection to the microbiome, or vice versa, because the three major neurodegenerative disorders – Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS – all have a GI component to them. In fact, many patients who are ultimately diagnosed with Parkinson's are known to have had GI disturbances decades before they develop motor symptoms. And a recent study showed that patients with Parkinson's disease have different microbiomes than matched controls. While this is an exciting finding, this kind of study needs to be interpreted with caution as it is an association and does not prove a causative link. So there are flash bulbs going off in the dark, suggesting that very complex neurodegenerative disorders may be linked to the microbiome. But once again this is very speculative. These seminal findings, the flash bulbs, are only just beginning to illuminate our vision of the gut-microbiome-brain connection

 

[ahmo]

New journal by neurologist David Perlmutter, Brain and Gut http://www.drperlmutter.com/brain-gut/