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Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#41

Post by Fomite »

msbroadf wrote: post #22
jliptzin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, usually the first step is to prescribe antidepressants

No, it was removed for ulcerative colitis. If gut bacteria affected mood I would have noticed now I have a lot less but there wasn't any change.

The usual issue is not the overall amount of gut bacteria, but the composition. While bowel surgery can disrupt the composition of your gut flora, it need not have to, and if there was no major accompanying lifestyle changes, it's possible it eventually returned to equilibrium.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#42

Post by Fomite »

cpncrunch wrote: post #27

I'm curious why these articles are posted so often on HN. Do a lot of people here have mood disorders? If so, would it not be better to look at the more obvious causes -- lifestyle and stress -- rather than trying to pin the blame on some outside entity? There really isn't much if any evidence supporting this hypothesis at the moment, and even if there is an effect it appears to be relatively minor.

As someone mentioned, there's a lot of bio/pharma/med people who read HN, myself included.

Also, if this is true, you're getting closer to being able to 'hack' your own microbiome. Microbiota transplantation as a wetware patch is a pretty cool concept.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#43

Post by Fomite »

blfr wrote: post #4
DanBC wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like a plausible mechanism when you first hear it, and so it doesn't get much research. It's not that long ago that we found gut flora that helps cause some obesity; and other gut flora that helps cause normal weight.

My point is that you wouldn't need research if the effect was large. If depressed people stopped acting depressed after having a minor infection (treated with antibiotics), they would notice. Their families would notice. Just like people figured out that quarantine works long before we had the germ theory, and without knowing any statistics.

Keep in mind that you'd need a long term change in your gut flora - a short term disruption by a single course of antibiotics is usually returned to equilibrium in a short amount of time, and would be easily masked by the psychological effects of actually being sick.

Longer term microbiome disruptions are also major life events. It's a hard thing to disentangle.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#44

Post by shabble »

uberlux wrote: post #36
mjklin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Principles of Psychology , William James speculated that any kind of non-corporeal afterlife would necessarily be non-emotional, since our emotions are felt in our bodies rather than our brains.

If we ever managed to emulate our consciousness on other hardware, wouldn't we be also able to emulate bodily sensations and emotions?

As an ignorant layperson, I kind of assume we could. A virtual machine thinks it has a network card and a hard disk and whatever, but it's just being given what it expects to see.

The problem I was imagining is that right now we're not recording that data in the way that we're, e.g. scanning the brain's neuron connections. So even if we could rebuild/emulated Frozen Jim's Brain, there may be permanent loss of essential information that was distributed around his lymph system or population of gut bacteria such that 'the same person' cannot be reconstructed.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#45

Post by Digit-Al »

cpncrunch wrote: post #27

I'm curious why these articles are posted so often on HN. Do a lot of people here have mood disorders? If so, would it not be better to look at the more obvious causes -- lifestyle and stress -- rather than trying to pin the blame on some outside entity? There really isn't much if any evidence supporting this hypothesis at the moment, and even if there is an effect it appears to be relatively minor.

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I really enjoy reading articles on interesting subjects - even if they have no bearing on my own life. That's why I love HN, because you can find interesting articles on subjects that you may otherwise never know anything about.

Knowledge is like fast always on broadband, or a good smartphone. When you don't have it, you have no idea what it can do for you. Once you have it, you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#48

Post by CuriouslyC »

chippy wrote: post #9

This reminds me of the cases where a course of antibiotics for something unrelated cured chronic back pain. http://www.naturalnews.com/040354_chronic_back_pain_antibiot... It also reminds me of Russian "phages" bacterial concoctions as cures for certain illnesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

I think this is one of the mechanisms behind detoxifying fasts. Severe caloric restriction for an extended period (I'm guessing at least 3 days) results in major changes in your gut flora, some of which may persist upon resumption of a normal diet.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#49

Post by Shorel »

cpncrunch wrote: post #26

It's a little concerning that Mazmanian believes that diet can help autism, when all the placebo-controlled trials show that none of the weird and wacky diets actually work.

I believe that for this article placebo controlled trials for fecal transplant are a lot more relevant than diet trials.

Re: Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?

#50

Post by mentat »

mjklin wrote: post #30
shabble wrote: post #19

Another thing I've been pondering occasionally is what this and other discoveries might mean if cryonic neuropreservation (head/brain only) storage & reversal is ever practical, or if full head transplants become a viable surgery. Just how much of actual personness is stored in places other than just the brain? Surely the hormonal (endocrine?) systems of the body, as well as things like the microbiome are going to pl…

In Principles of Psychology , William James speculated that any kind of non-corporeal afterlife would necessarily be non-emotional, since our emotions are felt in our bodies rather than our brains.

That seems like a rather limited view of location in the opposite. We feel emotion in all of us including our brains.
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