Bowel flora or intestinal flora protect us against disease and may impact on the operation of our brain. Scientists are now investigating whether bowel flora transplants can help in the treatment of depression and anxiety.
An estimated hundred billion bacteria live in your intestines. They are important for your health but problems with bowel flora can lead to a whole list of health issues.
Bowel flora can also impact of how your brain operates and to a certain degree affect your behaviour.
As part of their research scientists transplanted bowel flora from anxiety-prone mice to normal mice and this resulted in the normal mice becoming more anxious. Prof Lukas Van Oudenhove of Leuven University says the scientists then went a step further transplanting bowel flora from anxious people and well-balanced people to mice. The mice that got the bowel flora from the anxious humans became anxious themselves, while this didn’t happen to the other mice.
“It appears psychological characteristics can be transplanted using bowel flora” says Prof Van Oudenhove.
Unfortunately, ethical considerations prevent the transplant of human bowel flora from an anxious person to a non-anxious human just to see what would happen.
Studies looking at the transplant of bowel flora from healthy individuals to people with psychological complaints usually show a temporary positive effect on psychological well-being says Prof Van Oudenhove.
Unfortunately the patients weren’t healed because symptoms returned.
Long-term effects haven’t yet been studied says Marie Joossens of Ghent University.
Scientists believe that in future bowel flora transplants will be used as an additional therapy when treating patients with psychological complaints, but Marie Joossens warns: “You’re never certain what you will be transplanting. For all we know you could also be increasing the risk of diabetes, bowel cancer or Parkinson’s at the same time”.
Philosopher Kristien Hens of Antwerp University likes to make the comparison with Temptation Island: “People take part, but don’t fully realise the consequences. You may be a different person afterwards. That’s tremendously hard to predict”.