Slashdot Mirror
A Baffling Brain Defect Is Linked to Gut Bacteria, Scientists Say (sciencealert.com)
Gina Kolata from The New York Times writes about a baffling brain disorder that is linked to a particular type of bacteria living in the gut (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source) The new study, published on Wednesday in Nature, is among the first to suggest convincingly that these bacteria may initiate disease in seemingly unrelated organs, and in completely unexpected ways. The researchers studied hereditary cerebral cavernous malformations -- blood-filled bubbles that protrude from veins in the brain and can leak blood or burst at any time. When Dr. Mark Kahn, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, began this work, the microbiome was the last thing on his mind. Dr. Kahn and his colleagues studied cerebral cavernous malformations as part of a larger effort to understand the development and function of blood vessels. Three genes have been linked to the disorder, and Dr. Kahn and his colleagues tried to figure out what these mutations really do. The scientists were able to mimic the condition in mice by deleting a gene that is mutated in many patients. A year ago, the scientists moved to a new building, and something unexpected happened. The experimental mice stopped developing the brain malformations. Dr. Kahn's student, Alan T. Tang, had been deleting the gene by injecting a drug into the abdomens of the mice. Sometimes a mouse would get an infection that would lead to an abscess, and bacteria leaked from the gut into the blood. In the new building, only those mice still developed the brain defect. The other gene-deleted mice did not. He and his colleagues finally identified the culprit: Gram-negative bacteria, named for the way they stain, that carry a molecule in their cell walls, a lipopolysaccharide. Without a functioning gene, the lipopolysaccharide can signal veins in the brain to form blood bubbles.
A Baffling Brain Defect Is Linked to LinkedIn...
I knew was something wrong with the people that use LinkedIn! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Cerebral Cavernous Malformations was the name of my punk rock band in college.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Parkinson's has some connections to the gut. For instance, it is correlated with constipation. Also people who drink a lot of coffee or tea are less likely to be afflicted. But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
With "ADHD, Asperger's, depression, and panic attacks" it seems high risk to pursue a job as a pilot, which the depression and panic attacks might disqualify you for.
Meanwhile you mention the engineering satisfying your inner geek.
May I suggest looking into becoming an aircraft mechanic?
Pay is pretty good and the fact that you work in the same place is easier to combine with family life.
Or even like in this case where there's a genetic cause and a gut flora cause. It takes both scenarios in combination to cause the disease, which is why it's hard to reproduce an exact cause.
There was an interesting segment regarding shit replacement therapy in a documentary "Life on Us". One of the patients had reported an inexplicable sudden loss of a long term depression after the treatment.
More research in this area would be really great, since a correctly balanced microbiome seems to have positive impacts on a pretty wide range of maladies from obesity to cognitive defects. I've recently been wondering whether or not the only difference between the skinny guy and the fat guy, both eating more or less the same garbage with the same sedentary activity level, is simply gut bacteria/digestive efficiency.
But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
As a medical student I can say that while common sense and gut feeling would seemingly agree with you, the science of how our bodies work does not. Bacteria do not have to be directly present in order to cause problems. As an example you can take blood types, which most people are familiar with (A, AB, O). The antibodies that you have against the surface proteins of red blood cells of the different types are actually antibodies that are created against gut bacteria. However, mechanisms exist in each of us such that we do not develop antibodies against proteins that exist on our own cell structures, thus hindering our immune system from attacking our own proteins and cells.
This system is not fail-safe however and many auto-immune - where the body attacks itself - diseases exist (the field of rheumatology especially deals with a lot of these diseases). In short, just because antibiotics may wipe out a particular strain of gut bacteria that is present, the effect of that gut bacteria may indeed persist through many diverse mechanisms (of which the above is only one example), some of which we don't yet fully understand, as hinted at by this paper.