By Caitlin Dow, PhD
Published August 26, 2019
“It sounds a bit like science fiction, doesn’t it?” says Valerie Taylor, head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Calgary.
She’s talking about evidence that microbes in your gut may influence your brain. For example:
■ Mice are anxious and prefer dark, enclosed spaces. But if they’re born and raised without gut microbes, they freely scurry around light, exposed areas.1
■ When microbe-depleted rats get fecal transplants from people with severe depression, they act more sad and anxious than rats that get transplants from people without depression.2
Other research hints that the microbiome may play a part in autism, Parkinson’s, and more.3
But there are enormous gaps in what we know. For one thing, the research has largely been done on rodents.
“Those rodent studies have advanced our understanding of the microbiome-gut-brain axis, but we don’t know what the results mean for people,” notes John Kelly, a lecturer in clinical psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.
“In most cases, you can’t compare what’s going on in a mouse with a human,” says Gregor Reid, professor of microbiology and immunology at Western University in Ontario. “We’ve cured cancer many times in mice.”
Here’s what researchers know…and what they’re still trying to figure out.
