It’s become an accepted fact that the millions of bacteria that live inside and all over us have a big impact on our health, with connections to gastrointestinal conditions and relationships to digestion, obesity, and skin conditions being in a way, intuitive: All those bacteria are right there, so it’s perhaps not that surprising that they affect bodily functions in their same region.
What’s been harder to understand, historically, has been the apparent connection between our resident bacterial communities, especially those in the gut, and the human brain — notoriously protected from bacteria by the blood-brain barrier.
Yet there’s more and more evidence that somehow, the bacterial colonies that live in our guts can affect and even somehow control how we feel.
Mark Lyte has been studying this relationship for approximately 30 years.
When he first started this work, “it was dismissed as a curiosity,” according to a recent profile of research into the gut-brain connection in The New York Times, but over time, as Lyte and others continued to publish their research, they uncovered more and more compelling evidence that bacteria could not only affect but could perhaps even be a causal factor in mental disorders — something that implies they could also be eventually used to treat these same conditions.
Researchers have shown that the presence of certain bacteria can identify people that are more prone to depression and anxiety disorders. Other bacterial communities have even been connected to conditions like hyperactivity and autism. Just last September, as the Times reported, the National Institute of Mental Health awarded up to $1 million to four separate research projects looking at ways to better understand how these colonies of gut bacteria affect mental health.
