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Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

med.stanford.edu

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Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#171

Post by MSFT_Edging »

alpineman wrote: post #163
hbcondo714 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend the site https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com for learning more about Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT) and its opportunities, especially for Autism and Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.

Fecal transplants...people will do anything to avoid eating a balanced, largely/wholly plant-based diet with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

I think the idea is that the biome is built up over time and you can't always just eat your way to certain bacteria growing in your gut.

I think the fecal transplants help to essentially seed your gut with healthy bacteria, which makes adapting to the proper diet easier when your body isn't constantly fighting you.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#172

Post by youknownothing »

inanutshellus wrote: post #9

Everyone's "poo-pooing" the article because the title doesn't mention mice, but, FWIW, stories of gut biota affecting humans behavior have been documented for a while. Memory gain is noteworthy, which is the article's "wow" factor, but everyone's just knee-jerk smirking so ... here's a few random articles to gross you out about the wild world of trading microbiota and, for better or worse, changing your personality:…

"butt juice infusion" xD

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#173

Post by randusername »

systemsweird wrote: post #88
slibhb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, gut microbiome stuff is massively overhyped. Here's a study that tried fecal transplants to treat mental illness (and found no effect): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41785480/ The pattern with this stuff is that, when a blinded study is carried out, there's usually no effect.

I think mainstream is mostly looking at the microbiome stuff wrong. Your microbiome is the downstream proxy of good lifestyle habits, not generally something to directly manage. Good diet, exercise, reducing stress, and sleeping well will improve digestion and all the downstream variables like microbiome, physical health, and mental health. This is basic ecology, the bacterial population dynamics in your colon are a…

I like this measured take, but I think we can also expect it to be a virtuous cycle.

Sure, you have to put in a lot of effort to get the system starting, but eventually the feedback loop pays dividends that outweigh the principal.

Everything else about the human body seems to be this way, adaptation or maladaptation.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#174

Post by youknownothing »

Unless I misread, I found interesting that exposing young mice to old-mice bacteria makes them behave old, but exposing old mice to young-mice bacteria doesn't make them behave young. I wonder if there is something in old-specimen bacteria that wins over young-specimen bacteria.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#175

Post by Aurornis »

mustaphah wrote: post #166
Aurornis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salient point of my comment is singular paper The rational mind should not be seeing singular papers and assuming they’re correct. There are a lot of incentives for researchers to publish amazing results that benefit their career. They find ways to publish these through small sample sizes, p-hacking, or worse like faking results. The amazing results usually disappear in larger studies by more rigorous researchers…

That's a fair clarification. I never said we have sufficient evidence to act. But "too good to be true" + "singular paper" together can become an unfalsifiable dismissal - by that logic, every important result looks suspicious before it replicates. The interesting question is what priors should update our confidence here. Stanford/Arc Institute and published in Nature + mechanistic grounding + prior research on gut-b…

> by that logic, every important result looks suspicious before it replicates

Every important result should look suspicious before replication. This is the rational way to interpret early research.

You should not allow your mental probability distribution to be anchored around the first claim you see that is proposed as a paper. In the modern publishing environment, a heuristic of assuming singular results will not replicate would be accurate more often than assuming they’re true.

This isn’t intuitively obvious until you’ve read a lot of papers. It’s unfortunate but true.

Even some of the widely accepted findings like the benefits of fish oil supplementation are having a hard time replicating in large scale studies. Go back 10 years and it was almost universally accepted that those early fish oil studies must be true.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#176

Post by wafflemaker »

hattmall wrote: post #146
wafflemaker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really crazy thing that happened to me when I changed diet to a more gut-biome friendly* is that (like I craved sweets before) I started craving vegetables and oatmeal. Like there was a regime change in my gut and the new guys pushed the buttons to get more of their food. (less/no simple sugars, much more vegetables and starches/fibers, regularly eating 4 corn/20 plant oatmeal few times a week)

> 4 corn/20 plant oatmeal What does this mean?

It's my own idea for a super oatmeal. Working on the idea that it's not just about having fiber in your diet, but more so about variated fiber. Each kind of fiber is preferred by a different type of gut bacteria (I'm just repeating after some hippy that most likely made that up). And the best gut biome is the most variated one. Usually pathologies stem from monocultures. Look at the most of the society. Bread, cookies, pretzels, even pizza etc. - it's all made of wheat. Sometimes you'll get oat cookies. But other grains show up in people's diets very rarely.

Here's the recipe. I'm using norwegian 5-grain oatmeal that has oats, wheat, barley, rye and spelt:

Recipe: Use two parts oatmeal (either 4-korn or 5-korn). Add one part nut mix and one part seed mix. So for 50 g of oats, add 25 g of nuts and 25 g of seeds.

Seeds: 30% flaxseed 30% chia 20% pumpkin seeds 20% sesame

Nuts: 4 parts walnuts 2 parts pecans 1 part Brazil nuts

P.S.: since most of these ingredients are pretty cheap (oatmeal used to be poor mans food), you can upgrade to Eco versions of these and get much better taste, without going that much up in price. Especially nuts.

Also, I have the nutmix and seed mix pre blended in 2 liter jars, so that I only have to mix them once a month or two.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#177

Post by [deleted] »

grvdrm wrote: post #164
zinkem wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this research is totally true-- I had a lot of memories come back after 1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana 2. managed my diet to avoid heartburn without medication 3. schedule my meals so it was easier to sleep at night (always eat something for breakfast when I wake up) I did not need any "poo infusion" or anything. I had a gal bladder removal that didn't fix the problems t…

Fascinating to hear. I am trying to cut alcohol - still not entirely successful. But I've been able to cut for months at a time. Whenever the cut happens, I feel my brain sort of "return" roughly a week or two in. I'm not sure how to explain it other than something like fog clearing. Obviously makes some intuitive sense when you read it. However, as someone that has consumed alcohol somewhat regularly (sometimes more…

[deleted]

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#178

Post by ljf »

mustaphah wrote: post #58
jrapdx3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long regarded the great variety of chilis as its own distinct food group. But wonderful as they are for flavoring food, quite often in my home, I'm not sure how much of an effect orally consumed capsaicin has on memory functioning. Conceivably parenteral capsaicin has different effects on hippocampal integrity or physiology than achievable with ingestion. I'm not familiar enough with disposition of capsaicin in…

Chili could work [1], but not too much of it [2] [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27079706/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31137805/

No 2 is a fascinating study! My mother was 'taking' (eating) large amounts of raw chilli as she found it a very efficient cure for her rheumatoid arthritis - she had brilliantly reduced joint pain. BUT after a few years it caused painful and disfiguring rosacea.

She stopped the chilli and moved to acupuncture for the arthritis, which worked pretty much as well, but not something she can do herself at home for 'free'.

Since she has v low BML, I'm now pleased to see she stopped eating too much chilli!

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#179

Post by mortenjorck »

sooheon wrote: post #160
idiotsecant wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blood brain barrier is a deny by default firewall. If there is no transporter configured for a particular molecule, it doesn't get through. There is no transporter for serotonin

Your nervous system extends over your entire body, the brain doesn't live in a firewalled jar.

To extend the metaphor, the brain may have a robust firewall, but it also transacts with millions of clients over a separate (electric rather than chemical) network.

Re: Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice

#180

Post by butlike »

grvdrm wrote: post #164
zinkem wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this research is totally true-- I had a lot of memories come back after 1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana 2. managed my diet to avoid heartburn without medication 3. schedule my meals so it was easier to sleep at night (always eat something for breakfast when I wake up) I did not need any "poo infusion" or anything. I had a gal bladder removal that didn't fix the problems t…

Fascinating to hear. I am trying to cut alcohol - still not entirely successful. But I've been able to cut for months at a time. Whenever the cut happens, I feel my brain sort of "return" roughly a week or two in. I'm not sure how to explain it other than something like fog clearing. Obviously makes some intuitive sense when you read it. However, as someone that has consumed alcohol somewhat regularly (sometimes more…

I feel that same way you described with the "fog" clearing. I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm imagining it being the fact I _finally_ get some good, restful sleep (with it taking about 2 weeks give or take for that clear headed feeling to regenerate).
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