Weird title I know, keep reading it will make sense 😂💩
You have probably heard of all the research into the relationship between the gut microbiota and the brain and mental health blah blah.
Tldr, there's clearly a connection between the trillions of microbes living in our intestines and our brain development, function etc. Just do a Google search on brain-gut axis if you wish to learn more.
Anyways, let's get to the point of the post which is an interesting paper I stumbled upon today. What I found mostly interesting wasn't the results or the findings, just the methodology 🙃
Tldr, they took poop from two groups. One heavily depressed and one healthy. And they transplanted that poop to a bunch of microbiota-deficient rats.
Yep, fecal transplant is a thing if you didn't know :)
Thirty four patients with major depression and 33 matched healthy controls were recruited.
A Fecal Microbiota transplantation was prepared from a sub group of depressed patients and controls and transferred by oral gavage to a microbiota-deficient rat model.
And not surprisingly the rats receiving the depressed poop got depression:
Fecal microbiota transplantation from depressed patients to microbiota-depleted rats can induce behavioural and physiological features characteristic of depression in the recipient animals, including anhedonia and anxiety-like behaviours, as well as alterations in tryptophan metabolism
So yeah, more solid proof for the whole brain - gut thing.
Who knows... Maybe depression is one healthy fecal transplant away from getting treated 🙃💩😂
Yeah probably not 😂
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