The gut microbiome -- the ecosystem of tiny organisms inside us all -- has emerged as fertile new territory for studying a range of psychiatric conditions and neurological diseases. Research has demonstrated the brain and gut are in constant communication and that changes in the microbiome are linked to mood and mental health. Now a study published this month in Nature Mental Health finds distinct biological signatures in the microbiomes of people who are highly resilient in the face of stressful events.
“The accuracy with which these patterns emerged was really amazing,” says Arpana Church , a neuroscientist at UCLA’s Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center who led the new study. The research is a jumping off point for future human studies that some researchers believe could ultimately lead to treatments. It may also point the way to biomarkers in the microbiome that help guide decisions around treatment and mental health.
Resilience linked to anti-inflammatory microbes For their analysis, Church and her team separated 116 adults without a mental health diagnosis into two groups based on how they scored on a scale of psychological resilience. Next, they sifted through a huge amount of data gathered from brain imaging, stool samples and psychological questionnaires and fed that into a machine-learning model to find patterns. This analysis of gene activity, metabolites and other data came up with several key associations in the high resilience group.
In the brain, there were in.