Depressed Poop Will Give You Depression

Weird title I know, keep reading it will make sense 😂💩

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You have probably heard of all the research into the relationship between the gut microbiota and the brain and mental health blah blah.

Tldr, there's clearly a connection between the trillions of microbes living in our intestines and our brain development, function etc. Just do a Google search on brain-gut axis if you wish to learn more.

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Anyways, let's get to the point of the post which is an interesting paper I stumbled upon today. What I found mostly interesting wasn't the results or the findings, just the methodology 🙃

Tldr, they took poop from two groups. One heavily depressed and one healthy. And they transplanted that poop to a bunch of microbiota-deficient rats.

Yep, fecal transplant is a thing if you didn't know :)

Thirty four patients with major depression and 33 matched healthy controls were recruited.

A Fecal Microbiota transplantation was prepared from a sub group of depressed patients and controls and transferred by oral gavage to a microbiota-deficient rat model.

And not surprisingly the rats receiving the depressed poop got depression:

Fecal microbiota transplantation from depressed patients to microbiota-depleted rats can induce behavioural and physiological features characteristic of depression in the recipient animals, including anhedonia and anxiety-like behaviours, as well as alterations in tryptophan metabolism

So yeah, more solid proof for the whole brain - gut thing.

Who knows... Maybe depression is one healthy fecal transplant away from getting treated 🙃💩😂

Yeah probably not 😂

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References

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27491067/

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